Sales Data Loader 365
Make analyzing heterogenous data easy!
These days it’s difficult to imagine an organization that doesn’t analyze operational data when making managerial decisions. In order to make reading the results of these analyses easier, they tend to focus on how the data is visualized. However, visualization is not the most important factor in determining the value of the results - the integrity and accuracy of the analyzed information are. An effective operational data collection, testing, and consolidation process (often referred to as ETL – Extraction, Transformation, Loading) is necessary for quality business analytics. In order to automate the process of preparing source data for analysis, we present Sales Data Loader.
Sales Data Loader 365
Preparing Heterogenous Data for Analytics
Sales Data Loader is an ASP.NET 5 web application that can be installed on the Internet or on a Microsoft IIS server on a local network. It works with any version of Microsoft SQL Server supported by Microsoft, and all the user needs to access it is a web browser.
Sales Data Loader lets you use nothing more than Microsoft Excel files that your analysts are used to at every stage of the ETL process. You don’t need access to the SQL server or admin privileges. All users interact with the SQL server using the ETL loader web portal. Since the Sales Data Loader works with AD/Azure AD your users are automatically authorized. Their access level is determined based on membership in local groups on the Windows server that the portal’s IIS server is installed on. All changes to the loading and setup process are done by uploading and downloading Microsoft Excel files.
Key advantages:
- This solves the problem of matching columns between files received from partners and tables on the SQL server. Sales Data Loader keeps a special converter table on the SQL server that assigns conversion rule IDs to each partner’s reports. The data in this table isn’t edited very often since the report formats of a single partner rarely change. However, if you need to change the conversion table, your users can download its contents as an Excel file, make the necessary edits, and upload it back to the SQL server.
- This solves the problem of product IDs differing between the partner and the producer. ID tables can also be downloaded, edited locally, and uploaded back to the SQL server.
- This solves the problem of maintaining a data defect indicator dictionary for discarding extraneous lines. If necessary, you can download any other reference table that the SQL server uses (such as a point-of-sale reference table), edit it using Microsoft Excel, and upload it back to the server via the loader portal.
- This approach refines your data. For example, entered data can be categorized according to predetermined product groups for tracking sales within them using a so-called Product Tree. This Tree can also be downloaded and edited if needed.
- Before uploading the data to the SQL server, users can download it as a Microsoft Excel table, check the results, update the ID table and data defect indicator reference table, re-check the results, and only upload the prepared accurate data to the SQL server.
