4.3. Data for Importing Categories

Consider several examples. The table below shows the raw data used to import channel categories into Streamline. Categories for items or locations can be imported similarly.

Date	Item	Location	Channel category	Channel sub-category	Channel	Qty sold
12/30/2023	Item 1	Location 1	E-commerce	us.website1	us_w1_customer1	100
11/10/2023	Item 2	Location 1	E-commerce	us.website1	us_w1_customer2	110
12/30/2023	Item 1	Location 1	E-commerce	ca.website1	ca_w1_customer1	100
11/10/2023	Item 2	Location 1	E-commerce	ca.website1	ca_w1_customer2	110
12/30/2023	Item 1	Location 1	E-commerce	us.website2	us_w2_customer1	130
11/10/2023	Item 2	Location 1	E-commerce	us.website2	us_w2_customer2	300
12/30/2023	Item 1	Location 1	E-commerce	ca.website2	ca_w2_customer1	130
11/10/2023	Item 2	Location 1	E-commerce	ca.website2	ca_w2_customer2	300
10/11/2023	Item 1	Location 1	Physical distributor	US distributor	US main customers	200
9/11/2023	Item 2	Location 1	Physical distributor	US distributor	US other customers	233
10/11/2023	Item 1	Location 1	Physical distributor	Canada distributor	Canada main customers	543
9/11/2023	Item 2	Location 1	Physical distributor	Canada distributor	Canada other customers	252
Each triple Item, Location, Channel must be unique. Otherwise, Streamline chooses a subset of unique records from the provided set randomly.

In Streamline this will create a hierarchy depicted in the figure below.

Empty categories at the end of the hierarchy are perfectly possible: Category1 > Category2 > ⌀ > ⌀ means that the item will be put into the Category2. The symbol ⌀ means an empty category.

Empty category within the hierarchy

Empty categories anywhere else in the hierarchy are also allowed but discouraged. For example, Category1 > ⌀ > Category3. In this case, Streamline creates a subcategory with an empty name.

Consider an example of Item Info table that illustrates the above statement. In this case, we use item categories (see table below).

Item	Location	Country	State	City	On hand
Item 1	Shop 1	US	New Jersey	Trenton	100
Item 2	Shop 2	US	California	San Diego	200
Item 1	Boutique 1	Monaco	Monaco	300

The imported data hierarchy is depicted in the figure below.

Empty category at the beginning of the hierarchy

Assume, we have a hierarchy of categories for items, however, there is an item that does not belong to any category. In this case, Streamline puts this item at the first category level. Below is an illustration using the Item Info table.

item	Item category 1	Location	On-hand
Item 1	Item category1	Shop 1	100
Item 2	Item category1	Shop 2	200
Item 3	Boutique 1	300

The result of the import is shown in the figure below.

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