An electronics components distributor kept discovering supplier price hikes months late — at stocktake, when the margin was already gone. We built a pipeline that parses every incoming price list and diffs it against ERP costs overnight. Leaks now surface in a day.
Typical results
8,000
SKUs diffed on every list
+2.7 pts
Gross margin recovered
1%
SKUs below target margin, from 14%
Figures reflect typical results for this kind of automation.
The challenge
Dozens of suppliers sent price lists in every imaginable format — Excel, PDF, even screenshots — and nobody could diff 8,000 SKUs by hand. Hikes typically surfaced around 90 days later, after quarters of selling at stale prices. At any moment, 14% of the catalog sold below target margin, and re-keying lists burned six hours a week.
Before and after
Days to catch a supplier price change
−99%SKUs selling below target margin
−93%Weekly hours re-keying price lists
−100%The automation
We built a monitoring pipeline on the purchasing inbox. Every incoming price list — Excel, CSV or PDF — is parsed and mapped to catalog SKUs, then diffed line-by-line against current ERP costs. Changes above threshold fire a margin-impact alert showing the exact SKUs, new margin and revenue at stake. One approval cascades updated costs and recalculated sell prices through the ERP and web store, with every move logged to an audit trail.
How it works
- 01
Parse anything
Price lists arriving as Excel, CSV or PDF are parsed and mapped to catalog SKUs automatically.
- 02
Diff every line
Each line is compared against the current ERP cost — changes computed in shekels and margin points.
- 03
Alert on impact
Changes above threshold fire an alert listing the exact SKUs, the new margin and the revenue at stake.
- 04
Cascade on approval
One approval pushes updated costs and recalculated sell prices through the ERP and web store.
- 05
Log everything
Every change lands in an audit trail — which list, which approver, which prices moved.
Starts from
- Incoming supplier price lists
- Current ERP costs
Delivers
- Margin-impact alerts
- Cost & price cascade to ERP
- Margin watch dashboard
The impact
Price changes are now caught within a day instead of 90, across all 8,000 SKUs. Items selling below target margin dropped from 14% to 1% of the catalog, gross margin recovered 2.7 points, and the six weekly hours of re-keying price lists simply disappeared.
Questions about this automation
Which price list formats can the automation read?
It reads Excel and CSV files directly and extracts tables from PDF price lists with AI document parsing. Each supplier's columns are mapped to catalog SKUs once, so later lists from the same supplier are processed automatically. Lines that cannot be matched to a SKU go to a short review list.
When does the team get an alert?
Every line is compared with the current ERP cost. A change above the agreed threshold, for example a cost rise that pushes a SKU below its target margin, triggers an alert listing the affected SKUs, the new margin and the revenue at stake. Smaller changes are logged without interrupting anyone.
Are ERP prices changed automatically?
Only after approval. A purchasing manager reviews the alert and approves it with one click, and the updated costs and recalculated sell prices then flow to the ERP and the web store. Every change is kept in an audit trail. It is a multi-step build, usually rolled out in stages.