Pre-Import Requirements

Before importing the Product Hierarchy data, you will need to make sure that you satisfy some criteria to have a clean customer data platform on Lattice Atlas.

What is Product Hierarchy?

The Product Hierarchy is the family tree of your products or SKUs. It is a representation of how your SKUs are classified under different product categories. The classification can go up to four levels deep including the SKUs. Businesses typically have their product hierarchy stored in an ERP system. All the product purchases are usually tied to the SKU of the Product Hierarchy.

File Construct

The Product Hierarchy can be very different depending on the company. They can have multiple levels with millions of SKUs. The Atlas platform requires this file to conform to one schema. We currently follow the below representation as shown in the screenshot above. Each row will contain one SKU and up to three product levels. The topmost parent is product level I and goes down to product level III. The SKU falls under product level III. In this way, we represent the multi-level hierarchy in a CSV file. Some SKUs may have fewer levels and in such cases, the hierarchy’s topmost should always be the product level I. If there are multiple hierarchical families in the file, an SKU can belong to only one family.

Hierarchy Validation

The hierarchy provided in the file is validated before loading into Atlas. If the validation fails, the hierarchy is not loaded and the previous hierarchy available in the system will be used. Some common errors are

• SKU belonging to more than one hierarchical family in the same file
• Circular dependencies, where the parent becomes the child and child becomes a parent.
• Broken links in the family tree

Replacing Existing Hierarchies

The Product Hierarchy cannot be incrementally loaded in two different Process and Analyze jobs. If there are multiple Product Hierarchy files, they have to be provided in the same Process and Analyze job or may be combined into the same file. When a new file is provided in a later job, the new file replaces the entire Product Hierarchy. If you provide an empty file, it will clean up the existing Product Hierarchy present in the system.

Choosing File Column Names

The platform does not allow to use duplicate names. The platform has a smart feature for auto-mapping and hence names such as,  “Account ID”,”accountid”,” account id”, etc will all be identified as the ID column. Using it more than once causes a duplicate column issue and fails the upload. In such cases, you will need to change the column name to something else while uploading.

Column Name Limits

There is a fixed length you can have on each column name. The maximum length a column name can have is 63 characters.

Business Calendar

You will be need to configure your tenant’s calendar in case it wasn’t configured before importing the hierarchy. This is required as the Product Hierarchy will be used to calculate Spend Analytics on Buyer Insights. The Business Calendar is available on the My Data page. For more information on how to use Business Calendar, see the Configuring Business Calendar.

Creating Import Templates

In order to import first party data into Atlas, the columns from the data file have to be mapped to fields in Lattice. Each field mapped is an attribute about your Product Hierarchy that can be used across different use cases on the platform. Once the field mapping is complete, a Product Hierarchy Import Template is generated. This template can be used to 

1. Import data files through UI manually

2. Import data files in an automated fashion

The templates page can be accessed by clicking on the "Import Data" button on the My Data page. 

A page showing all the objects will be be listed along with a "Create Template" option on each. Select the "Create Template" on Product Hierarchy. 

Upload the hierarchy data file. The file could be a sample or the actual file that needs to be imported. Atlas will take you through the field mapping process shown below screen by screen.

Step 1

Step 2

This will be the last page where you can go back and modify your field mapping. 

Save Template (Final Step)

Once the upload and field mapping process is complete, Atlas will provide you an option to import the data along with the template creation. If you check the option, the file is queued for validation and import. You will need to confirm by clicking “Submit”. Clicking “Submit” along with the import data option will take you to Jobs page. You will be able to track the progress of the job on this page. For more information on the jobs processing, please refer to the Data Processing and Analysis tab under the Job Page.

Further more, Atlas also provides the option of changing the saved template with the "Edit Template" option. When it is clicked, the user will be guided through the same field mapping workflow to map/re-map the columns from the input file.

Manual Import through UI

Atlas now has the Product Hierarchy template ready to import data. Click on "Import Data" and upload the Hierachy with the same template that was created. The import can later be tracked from the Data Processing and Analysis page. 

Automated Imports

Atlas provides the capability of setting up automation for recurring imports. Please visit the Setting up Import Automation for more information.