The document discusses how Wheel Dealers Ltd, an online automotive marketplace, can reduce vendor onboarding time through automated data integration. Currently, Wheel Dealers receives data from dealerships manually through various file formats, which requires their IT team to manually code integrations. This is inefficient as the company grows. Automating the process through a product like Astera Centerprise could extract, validate, standardize, and load data into reusable flows. This would save Wheel Dealers time during onboarding, allow developers to focus on other work, and reduce costs compared to manual coding. The presentation provides an example vendor integration and how automated tools could benefit Wheel Dealers.

1. Reducing Vendor Onboarding Time with
Automated Data Integration
Speakers:
Adnan Sami Khan – Product Documentation Specialist
Mike A. O’Quinn - VP Product Management

2. Every Organization Needs
External Partners
• Collaboration has become a strategic imperative as industries across the world go
global.
• 88% of companies polled in a recent ZDNet survey indicated that they worked with at
least one external partner or vendor.
• These external relationships are built on open communication and the systematic
exchange of information between parties.
• Statistics from Hackett show that bottom quartile of companies spend 60 percent of
their time compiling supplier data, while the top quartile spend less than 30 percent.
• Supply Chain Leaders are over 30% more likely to have an efficient supplier data
management process to accelerate supplier onboarding (Aberdeen Report)

3. MANUAL DATA INTEGRATION
AUTOMATED VENDOR ONBOARDING

4. For Your Reference
• Visit Astera.com/webinars for a complete replay of today’s discussion.
• Type your questions into the chat box. We will address as many a possible at the
end of the webinar.

5. Introducing
Wheel Dealers Ltd
Online automotive marketplace providing
listings for new and used cars in regions
across the United States
SME with less than 100 employees that
operate out of Massachusetts
Currently work with around 200 dealerships
across Massachusetts and the Mid-Atlantic
region
Around 1 million unique visitors per
month and growing!
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6. Wheel Dealers: Onboarding Process
Wheel Dealers receives
vendor data through an FTP
server in a wide variety of
file types – primarily Excel,
CSV, and Delimited formats.
Submissions contain 21
standard fields
encompassing everything
from car mileage and color
to dealership details.
Collecteddata needs to be
validated and centralized
for presentation on the
company’s front-facing
listings portal.
Currently, partner
documentation is
integratedusing a manual
approach, which requires
IT team to create custom
coding to extract,
transform, and load each
dealership’s data.
Wheel Dealers employs
several different
technologies to coordinate
their external data
integrations.
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7. Wheel Dealers: The Problem
• As Wheel Dealers grows, developers are spending a disproportionate amount
of time manually fixing integration breaks and incorporating changes into
existing ETL flows
• Existing code is not reusable – each time a new vendor is onboarded, the
developers must start from scratch
• Sheer volume and complexity of code applied across multiple technologies
means that there is a high chance
of errors occurring across integration flows.
• Wheel Dealers has had to hire additional resources
to handle repetitive, low-value tasks

8. What does Wheel Dealers Need?
Automated data extraction from disparate sources
Repeatable process for incoming data validation
Ability to standardize data to conform to Wheel Dealers’ target repository
Wheel Dealers requires process automation so that new vendor files can be picked and deposited
from the FTP portal, and then delivered into the relevant integration flow for transformation and
loading.
Integration flows must be reusable and scalable as a single flow may be used to process thousands
of files from a single dealer over the course of a month
Modifications to existing flows should be easy to make, and the changes should ideally be
propagated across the entire ETL pipeline
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9. Astera Centerprise:
Automate Your Partner Onboarding
• Drag and drop connectors
• Custom expressions for standardization and validation
• Dynamically adapt dataflows
• Built-in name, date, and address parsers
• Variety of ODBC connectors
• Create uniform, repeatable onboarding processes with
subflows and workflows
• Execute multiple integrations simultaneously
• Automate dataflow execution through either time or
event-based triggers
• Utilize the job monitor to get a complete overview of all
ETL operations

10. How Wheel Dealers Benefits
Time Saved
Vendor onboarding time has
been cut down from hours or
even days to mere minutes.
Value Added
Developers can be better
deployed towards optimizing
the organization’s analytics
and listings directory for end-
users.
Cost Savings
If a business user or coding
novice can accomplish the
same task using an ETL tool,
and that too using less time,
wouldn’t you rather use their
expert skills for a more
complicated task?
Accessibility
Visual interface, automation,
ease of reusability; are just some
of the factors that make ETL
tools a preferred option for
integration projects involving
multiple users.

11. Q&A Session