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Inventory aggregation with csv files

We have a drop-ship company and receive 15 inventory updates daily from our drop-ship vendors. Currently we are manually editing and uploading each and every one of these csv files that we receive to our inventory management system. We would like a solution that provides aggregation of the csvs and automatically processes these csvs with the needed formating to upload to our inventory management system. Hopefully this makes sense.

Any ideas?

Sincerely,

Completely Clueless

mankowitz

Much of this depends on your inventory management system. If it is a common database, and you have access to it, I would probably set up a web site, ask the vendors to upload their files. I would parse them with php and then directly insert the new records into the existing database.

php has builtin str_getcsv to parse the csv and has adapters to all the common databases.

Of course, there are an infinite number of other languages that could do the same thing.

tbawarehouse

ASKER

Sounds great but I worry if they have to upload to a website I may get some kick back. Seeing as now they are just ftping the file which is an automated process. Would this be as well?

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mankowitz

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Qlemo

This very much depends on input and output format, of course. Processing CSVs isn't difficult, in Windows you would e.g. use PowerShell or VBS with an FileSystemWatcher or WMI event monitoring script to kick-start the script, or start it on a regular base as stated abvove.
Do you want to insert that into a database (which DBMS?), or construct a web page (HTML table)?

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AlexPace

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Qlemo

Could you tell why you chose that two answers as solution?