Machinery Brand Cuts Manual Work 90%+

This client is a leading heavy machinery brand operating across the UK, with a dealer network feeding orders into SAP.

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Every day, the operations team manually cross-referenced order numbers between a single SAP sheet and a sprawling dealer file of 10+ tabs, each laid out differently, just to keep serial numbers, customers, locations, and salesmen's data in sync.

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The brief was to replace hours of fragile manual matching with an automated engine that adapts to changing data layouts and never misses an entry.

• The operations team manually cross-referenced order numbers between a single SAP sheet and a dealer file of 10+ tabs every single day
• Each dealer tab used a different column structure, making any copy-paste workflow error-prone
• Case mismatches, trailing spaces, and formatting inconsistencies between SAP and dealer data caused missed matches and duplicate entries
• The entire manual process broke whenever a dealer added a new column mid-cycle, until someone noticed and adjusted

• Eliminate hours of daily manual cross-referencing between SAP and dealer spreadsheets
• Handle inconsistent column layouts across dealer tabs without breaking
• Catch and resolve data quality issues automatically before matching
• Stay resilient when a dealer changes their spreadsheet structure mid-cycle
• Guarantee zero missed serial number entries going forward

• Built a smart sync engine in n8n and JavaScript that reads order numbers from SAP, searches across all dealer tabs with intelligent column mapping, and syncs matched data back automatically
• Mapped each dealer tab's column positions explicitly in configuration, so the system handles layout variations without breaking
• Added automatic data normalization to resolve case mismatches, trailing spaces, and formatting inconsistencies before matching, eliminating false negatives
• Built duplicate-safe write logic that skips serial numbers already present and writes new ones along with customer, location, and salesman data
• Designed the config-driven structure to absorb layout changes, including a dealer adding a new column mid-project, without breaking the pipeline

• 90%+ reduction in manual data entry time - Freed the operations team from hours of daily cross-referencing between SAP and dealer spreadsheets
• 10+ dealer tabs auto-synced daily - Every tab, regardless of its column layout, now feeds into SAP without manual matching
• Zero missed serial number entries - Automatic data normalization closed the case-mismatch and formatting gaps that used to cause dropped matches
• Duplicate-safe writes across every sync - Serial numbers already in the system are skipped automatically, with no duplicate entries created
• Resilient to layout changes - When a dealer added a new column mid-project, the system adapted without breaking, exactly as designed

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