Your supplier data is in six places, and none of them agree.
Ask what stock you actually hold of a specific SKU and you'll get six different answers, depending who you ask and which spreadsheet, feed, or screen they're looking at. None of them are lying. They're just all out of date in a different way, which is a product data management problem.
Every one of these is trying to describe the same catalogue. None of them talk to each other, so none of them are right for long.
Supplier feeds
Updated on the supplier's schedule, not yours, stock and pricing already stale by the time it lands.
Spreadsheets
Whoever edited it last wins. No audit trail, no way to know which version is current.
The ERP
Only as accurate as the last manual re-key, and re-keying six sources by hand doesn't happen consistently.
The website
Shows what was true when someone last remembered to update it, not what's true right now.
The warehouse floor
The only place stock is actually counted by hand, and the last place any system asks.
Someone's private list
The one person who “just knows” what's really in stock. It works until they're on holiday.
Why this happens
The data was never supposed to have one home.
01
Every system was added for its own job
The ERP for orders, the spreadsheet for the one supplier who doesn't do feeds, the website plugin for the shop, each one solved its own problem and nobody planned how they'd stay in sync.
02
Syncing is a manual job nobody owns
Someone has to notice a mismatch and fix it by hand. When they're busy, which is always, the mismatch just sits there.
03
No consistent SKU across sources
The same product has a different code in the supplier feed, the ERP, and the website. Matching them is treated as a one-off project instead of an ongoing job.
04
Nobody fully trusts any of them
So everyone double-checks against their own private version, which creates a seventh source of truth, and a seventh version of wrong.
One catalogue · DO-ART-942
Two ways to run it · one catalogue either waydecodedops.co.uk · DO-ART-942 · Rev 01
How I help
One matched catalogue, and every channel reads the same data.
For product data management, Works takes every supplier feed in, matches it against your existing catalogue, and becomes the single source every other system reads from: the website, the warehouse.
In one deployment, 317,812 products came in from supplier feeds and 154,518 were matched to a supplier automatically, before anyone had to touch them. Same principle, any supplier mix.
Find out what your six sources actually disagree about.
A Clarity Audit maps every source you're running today and what it would take to get them all reading from the same data.
