Easily entertained

A huge part of what I do is "clean" product lines. Cleaning involves making sure each item is in the system only once, has the correct price listed, and most importantly has a unique identifier. Normally the identifier is a catalog number assigned by the vendor, but if I'm lucky its a 12 digit code called a UPC. Most of my lines have had some sort of attention in the last three years, so while difficult there is not a "bang head on keyboard" level of frustration.

I can handle duplications very easily. I just merge the items into a single code. Pricing being off doesn't phase me. Most of the time I'm cleaning the line because the price is going to be changed by the vendor soon anyway. However, a catalog number or UPC is needed. Outside of product lines that have a handful of items, I can't get around it.

Today it was my vendor NWC's turn. I do not like NWC for a number of reasons. The main reason is that no one has gone through and "cleaned" this product line, ever. NWC has over 1000 items active in my system, and has over 4000 items on the pricing spreadsheet they sent me. Of all of the items in my system less than a quarter have an identifier, and there are more duplicates than I want to think about.

While this would be a very good reason to bang my head on my keyboard I decided to take a better approach. I decided to play what I like to call "The Delete Game." To start, I download all of the items in my computer system that I buy from one vendor. Next I sort out the ones that still have the codes from the old system as these are most likely to be obsolete. (Even if they aren't I still have to remove the old code so it is a two for one.) Then, one by one, I enter the item into the system and hit Alt+Del.

Best case, the system tells me to confirm that I want to delete the item by entering DELETE. For reasons hard to explain I find it fun when I get to enter DELETE. Today I got to delete 60% of the items I looked at. This means I'm winning. From the looks of things I'm going to keep winning. I could be upset by all of the bad data, or I could be happy that I don't have to find codes for as many items. I'm going with the latter.