E-Commerce Inventory Automation
Replaced 2 hours of daily manual parts filtering across 1.2M+ line items with a rule-based automation pipeline, with a turnaround of days, not weeks.
The Problem
The dealership group sold parts through an e-commerce platform, but getting inventory listed was a brutal manual process. The vendor ERP offered no direct database access, only an export tool that dumped a CSV of the full active parts catalog: 1.2 to 1.5 million line items.
Every morning, two staff members would pull that export and spend 1.5 to 2 hours manually scanning through it line by line, removing parts the company didn't want listed (open repair order parts, low-volume items, parts with no sourcing, and other criteria that shifted daily). They were scrolling through a million-row spreadsheet by hand, every single day.
An earlier attempt had automated the file transfer but left the manual filtering untouched, cutting maybe five minutes off a two-hour problem. The two staff members doing this work were experienced parts specialists whose actual value was on the phone with distributors, not buried in Excel.
What I Built
Rule Engine & Management Interface
Built a JavaFX desktop application where staff could maintain an exclusion list of parts the company didn't want sold online. The app gave them a simple interface to manage exceptions that the automated criteria engine didn't catch, without ever opening a spreadsheet.
Automated Pipeline
Scheduled the vendor ERP's export tool to drop the catalog CSV to an SFTP server. The pipeline pulls the file, parses 1.2M+ line items, applies the criteria engine to strip out parts that shouldn't be listed (open ROs, low-volume, unsourceable, and other dynamic rules), then runs a second validation pass against the manually maintained exclusion list. The cleaned catalog gets pushed to the e-commerce platform via API. The entire process runs unattended.
The e-commerce API was undocumented, so integration took some trial and error to get right. The earlier attempt had never gotten past the file transfer step.
The Outcome
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