Stock Feed Format

Background

The industry has many different systems and formats to inform dealers of stock availability and estimated lead times. There is also an increasing demand for virtual stock, often sourced from suppliers outside the traditional Office Products Industry. As sales are increasingly made via dealers e-commerce systems, it is important that dealers' customers are presented with reliable delivery information at the time of purchase.

Solution

The suggested format is not expected to replace current working stock feeds but to be a base for delivering stock availability data within the channel where more integrated systems are not used. It is designed to cover all products, whether in stock, made to order, on order but not yet available or discontinued. The following mandatory fields are recommended:-

Mandatory Fields

• Code (This to be the suppliers product code)
• Quantity Available (Full integers only and should follow the Boss Unit of Sale rules)
• Due Date (the date the supplier has product available to ship dd/mm/yyyy format)
• Product Status (stocked line/component line/new/discontinued etc.)

The due date should be the date that the supplier expects to ship the product to the customer. If the supplier ships from a warehouse outside the UK directly to a UK customer, the Due Date is the date of shipping from the overseas warehouse. If however the supplier ships from an overseas location to a UK warehouse for subsequent despatch, the Due Date is the estimated date of shipping from the UK to the customer.

It is anticipated that suppliers will have different ways of shipping to different customers, some may be next day and others could have a weekly delivery. It is expected that the dealers e-commerce system will be programmed to allow the appropriate additional time.

Product Status Flag

There are 5 Product States that should be mandatory so each product would be marked with one of the following flags:

1. Live Product
2. Withdrawn by a specific supplier, but still available either as a special or direct from the manufacturer
3. To be discontinued (it has not been agreed if this should have a specified time period - such as within 12 months)
4. Discontinued, but stock still available.
5. Obsolete - that is discontinued and no stock available.

Non Mandatory Fields

Should a supplier wish to supply additional information such as Barcodes, Customer codes or Minimum order quantity, it is recommended that these are added after the mandatory fields

File format

The file should be supplied in Excel or CSV format