A supplier sent a large spreadsheet every week. The shop needed matching attributes, short texts, and a feed file. Copy-paste took a day, and each run looked a little different.
What was wrong
- Names did not match the attributes, and required fields were often empty.
- The rules lived in the person’s head.
- Nobody trusted the result enough to import it without a full reread.
What was done
- Field rules and reject cases written down before the tool.
- A generator that outputs a clean CSV and a list of refused rows.
- A note on how to run it when the next supplier file arrives.
What works now
- Weekly prep is a short run, not a day of copying.
- Bad rows show up before they reach the catalog.
- Pushing that file into the shop on a schedule would be a later integrations job. This tool does not do that by itself.
What this case is not
- No supplier name, and no “time saved” figure. It is a composite.
- The tool prepares a file. It does not update the live catalog on its own.
- The service behind it: Custom tools.