First of all, note that the first upload wizard is a particular version of the wizard accessible on our platform. This version resets the database and therefore erases all the SKUs present in your account (with the exception of the demo data hosted in a special database).
The format of your file
We manage two different Excel or CSV file structures:
Dates in header: each line is an article, each column is either a field or a date.
If this is the kind of file you want to upload, you can watch this video tutorial:
Dates in column: each line is a transaction date.
If this is the kind of file you want to upload, you can watch this video tutorial:
How to access the first upload wizard
You can access the first upload wizard from 3 sources:
A dedicated email received right after your signup to ease your on-boarding
A product tour in the Home section of the platform
This link
Define your account settings
At this point, you will define the structure of your account.
The time bucket: it corresponds to the distance between 2 calculations of your forecasts for each article (month or week).
The month in which your fiscal year begins. This will allow you to obtain financial data based on your fiscal year.
The currency used in your financial statements.
Click on "Next".
Choose the file to import
Here you must select your XLSX or CSV file.
Our import engine will then automatically try to detect your data organization format and associate some of our fields with your data.
Upload Settings
At this stage, data contained in your file are analyzed by the wizard.
This may take several seconds according to the size of your file.
File with or without date?
The next box displayed will offer several options for organizing your data. If you are not satisfied with the tool suggestions, you can modify them.
For this first upload, the checkbox My file contains dates must be checked.
Then according to the format of your file, one of the other two boxes concerning the dates must be selected.
If Dates in the file header is selected then you should see the header of your file displayed as below. This will allow you to check that your dates are properly recognized by the wizard. If you see any issue, correct the selection in order to move to the next step.
If Dates in a column is selected (or if you select it manually), this means your file contains sales orders. In this case, you will be able to map each cell of the file header to the appropriate field of your SKU Science database. The upload process will take longer since the wizard needs to aggregate your data for each period.
Management of date formats and imported number formats
In the next two boxes, you will have to check the formats automatically detected for dates and numbers and adjust them if necessary.
Mapping fields
In the next box you can map the fields from your file to SKU Science fields. We advise you to at least map a field from your file as Part number.
Definition of forecast level
The following box allows you to choose the level at which you want to create your forecasts in SKU Science.
For this first test, we advise you to create a forecast for each article or part number, and therefore to simply choose Part number.
Note that it is however possible to create forecasts at different levels according to the fields that you will select in this dialog box.
For example, if you want to get forecasts by Part number and by Customer, this should be specified here.
Check the summary table
Finally, check the summary of your upload.
Compute KPI option
During the first upload only, you have the option to compute KPIs.
If you select it, and assuming your file contains at least 3 years of historical data, the platform computes the KPIs over the last 12 periods by making 12 successive forecasts. Hence, you directly get an idea of how the platform performs related to your own dataset. In order to know more about KPIs, please refer to this article.
Note that if you provide less than 3 years of data, you won't get KPIs even if you select this option.
Confirm the upload process
Click Confirm and the process starts automatically.
At the end of the process, you will obtain your forecasts, your KPIs and your dashboards!
