# From product data to delivered order

Field notes / 04

A customer sees a product, a price and a delivery date. Behind them sit master data, price lists, stock, the order itself, a warehouse and a carrier, usually in five or six systems owned by different teams. The store is the visible end of a chain, and it is only as reliable as the weakest link.

## What I learned the hard way

1. **One owner for every piece of data.** Product data, prices and stock each need one system that is right by definition. Two masters mean two truths and a support queue.
2. **Fix the master data before you integrate it.** An integration only moves bad data faster. Clean the catalogue, the units and the identifiers first.
3. **Prices are harder than they look.** Customer price lists, currencies, taxes, promotions, validity dates. Decide where each rule lives, and never calculate the same price in two places.
4. **Stock is a promise, not a number.** What matters is what you can deliver, and when. Agree how reservations, back orders and safety stock reach the store, and how fresh the figure has to be.
5. **Follow one order end to end before you scale.** Push a single real order through every system, including the carrier’s label and the invoice. Every manual step you find is a future incident.
6. **Design for the failure, not only for the flow.** Every hand-over between systems needs a retry, an alert and a person who looks at it. The silent failures are the expensive ones.
7. **Show the status to the customer and to support.** “Where is my order?” is the most common question there is. The answer should come from the same data in both places.

Diagram: Six stages in a chain, from master data through price lists, stock, the order and delivery to the shipping broker. Each stage has one owning system, and every hand-over between two stages is checked.

## Tips and tricks

- Draw the chain on one page, with the owner of each step.
- Agree the identifiers for product, customer and order once, and use them everywhere.
- Decide what happens when a price or a stock update arrives late.
- Test against the carrier’s real interface early. Shipping brokers surprise you.
- Monitor the queues between the systems, not only the systems.
- Keep a way to replay a failed message.

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