In recent months, we have experienced enormous growth in the number of product and price changes that we process on a daily basis. To give you an idea, we currently process > 7.5 MIO products > 70 MIO prices per day between 23:00 and 08:00 and this number is still growing. We have therefore decided to re-develop the Product Exchange service towards the Product Data Store (import) so that we become more scalable to handle the future workload. There is also a user story in the product backlog to adjust the brands and product group matching so that they can be used in the suspecting algorithms you devised. Our development resources are limited and we expect to be working on this for the rest of the year and would like to work with you again in 2022.
The current way of indexing the products has its limitations., sometimes wrong products are linked to a Product Data Index product, resulting in an inability to find the right products.
Secondly, the classifications and branding of the products can be improved.
Some ideas are to develop logic to identify whether the products belonging to a Product Data Index product are really the same.
Another idea is to use the database with 2.5 MIO products with the manual knowledge of classification inside, to extract that knowledge with machine learning so not the user has to decide on a classification mapping, but the machine does.
The idea, in general, is to identify suspects by comparing GTIN's, brands and manufacturer part numbers from the linked supplier items with each other.
The suspects will be displayed in the portal to the suppliers for their own products, the portal will also show the products that failed processing and not available in the Product Data Store. They can either correct their internal product data, so with the next processing, it will be correct, or mark the product to be correct. In that case, another supplier has probably to correct the product data.
Also, for the buyers, a portal will be available to display the suspects. And on top of that, the suspect flag will be available in the product data output and in the real-time Product Now.
Please find below a table for illustration with the processing errors and suspects, next to that is the user stories describing the suspect identification, supplier and buyer portal.
| SCENARIO | SELLER | SKU | GTIN/EAN | MFPR | BRAND | PRICE | REQUIRED OUTPUT |
| Valid product | A | A | A | A | A | € 100,00 | Valid product |
| B | B | A | A | A | € 101,00 | Valid product | |
| Duplicate SKU | A | A | A | A | A | € 100,00 | |
| A | A | B | B | B | € 200,00 | Report duplicate SKU to the supplier, product not available | |
| Duplicate MFPR | A | A | A | A | A | € 100,00 | |
| A | B | B | A | A | € 200,00 | Report duplicate MFPR to the supplier, product not available | |
| Duplicate GTIN | A | A | A | A | A | € 100,00 | |
| A | B | A | B | B | € 200,00 | Report duplicate GTIN to the supplier, product not available | |
| Duplicate GTIN/MFPR | A | A | A | A | A | € 100,00 | |
| A | B | A | A | A | € 200,00 | Report duplicate GTIN/MFPR to the supplier, product not available | |
| Brand difference | A | A | A | A | A | € 100,00 | Report suspect on brand, if correct, then report to other suppliers |
| B | B | A | A | B | € 101,00 | Required in output with suspect flag | |
| C | C | A | A | B | € 102,00 | ||
| GTIN difference | A | A | A | A | A | € 100,00 | Report suspect on GTIN to PDM, check and add to PDI or reject |
| B | B | B | A | A | € 101,00 | ||
| MFPR difference | A | A | A | A | A | € 100,00 | Report suspect on MFPR, required in output with suspect flag |
| B | B | A | B | B | € 101,00 |
As a Product Exchange user
I want matched products to be compared and suspects are identified
So that the buyers don’t get different products in their search results
Acceptance criteria:
Background:
Products are matched on GTIN or MFPR and brand. When the GTIN or MFPR is invalid, this can result in different products for one GTIN or MFPR. These can be identified as suspects by comparing prices and brands.
As a Product Exchange seller
I would like to, in case of suspects and errors as described in user story 1 and user story 3, be notified by mail and in the portal
So that we can monitor our product data quality and integrity to improve the searchability of our products
Acceptance criteria:
As a Product Exchange buyer
I would like to, in case of suspects and errors as described in story 1 and 2, be notified by mail and in the portal
So that we can monitor the data quality of our suppliers and Onetrail
Acceptance criteria