ALUK is one of the UK’s biggest suppliers of aluminium building systems. Their systems are used in large building projects around the world. ALUK are based in Gwent, Wales, and have facilities in Poland, Belgium, and France.

When ALUK expanded across the UK and Europe, they invested in a new stock control system. The data from their old system was incompatible with their new system. This meant it was not possible to just transfer the data from one system to the other. We developed an automated data wrangling tool to automate the full process for them.

A data conversion tool was needed to make their data ready for their new system. To convert the data several steps were needed.

Step One – Break the data down by SKUs, assemblies, and their component parts.

Step Two – Convert and clean the data.

Step Three – Rebuild the data in the new format.

With hundreds of thousands of different products and SKUs, the manual processing of the data would have taken years.

We developed a bespoke data wrangling tool that imported the original data and carried out several processes, including;

• Breaking assemblies down to their component parts
• Passing each component through a conversion process
• Reassemble the components into their assemblies ready for the new system

As a final check, an error capture system was used to capture any corrupt data that had got through the system.

For this project ALUK saw many benefits from their data conversion tool including;

• Simplified the preparation of data
• Automated error capture preventing errors entering their new system
• Saved over 3,500 hours

Since building the tool, we have helped ALUK with many other projects.