Session Notes: Janet — Product Entry

June 3, 2026 · Nate St. Pierre, Janet

Overview

This session focused on how products get added and maintained across Merrick's three systems: Ordova Advance (the primary product database), and the two industry distributor catalogs that feed the Brightmark Imaging website. Janet walked through the current workflow using one of the engraved-glass product lines as a working example, and the conversation surfaced both the catalog gap and the manual effort required to keep all three systems in sync.

Who Adds Products and Why

Product entry into Ordova happens for several different reasons, and different people handle each:

Sandra or Megan add products when Merrick is expanding its catalog — deciding to offer a new product line or adding styles that haven't been sold before.

Sales adds products on the fly during customer calls, when a customer wants something that exists (and Merrick can make or source it) but hasn't been entered into Ordova yet. This happens regularly — a customer might request a plate size that's technically available but not yet in the system. Sales enters what they need to process the order and moves on, without following a standardized process.

Janet adds parts — components that are part of a bill of materials for a finished product — rather than catalog products. Her additions are more structured and methodical.

The result is that product entries vary widely in quality and completeness depending on who entered them and under what circumstances.

How Product Entry Actually Works

The standard approach is to clone an existing product in Ordova and change the relevant details. Starting from scratch is rare — most new products are similar enough to something already in the system that cloning is faster and produces a more complete record.

There is a checklist for adding new products that specifies which fields need to be filled in and how. Janet mentioned that she doesn't always use it herself, and sales entering products during customer calls certainly doesn't follow it. For large batches of similar products, an Excel import is faster than entering records one at a time.

The result of inconsistent process: Janet has spent significant time combing through Ordova correcting entries — wrong field values, missing required fields, pricing that was entered for a single order and never validated as a general price. She described this as an ongoing cleanup effort.

The Catalog Gap

Sandra recently came to Janet about one of the engraved-glass product catalogs. Currently, 34 of those products are listed on the Brightmark Imaging distributor website (which is driven by one of the distributor catalogs). The actual universe of available products in that line is much larger — hundreds of options exist — and many of them are already in Ordova from previous orders. They just haven't been pushed to the distributor catalog and therefore don't appear on the website.

The constraint is time: pushing products from Ordova to a distributor catalog requires exporting from Ordova, reformatting the data to match the catalog's import template, and then running the import. There's no one dedicated to doing this, so it doesn't get done. The catalog has been static at 34 products while potentially dozens or hundreds more could be listed.

How Data Gets from Ordova to the Distributor Catalogs

Ordova does have a built-in push to one of the distributor catalogs, but Janet's experience is that it doesn't reliably populate all the required fields — you get a partial product record on the catalog side that still needs manual work. So the native push isn't practical as a workflow.

Janet's current process:

1. Export the relevant product data from Ordova as an Excel file
2. Use Claude to remap the data to the catalog's import format — the column names and structure are different between the two systems
3. Import the transformed sheet into the distributor catalog

The second distributor catalog is the same story with a different format — a separate import, separate column structure, done independently.

Janet does this process herself. It's not documented, and Sandra uses a different approach (manual entry, or a different variation of the same chain). The workflow works but it's fragile: Janet is the only person who does it this way, and the Claude-assisted transformation produces slightly different results each time (she flagged this explicitly — she understands that AI models aren't deterministic and produces consistent-enough results for her purposes, but it's not a reliable shared process).

A Better Architecture: Single Input, Multiple Outputs

Nate proposed an alternative during the conversation: rather than running export → transform → import chains per system, build a single AI-powered intake where product data goes in once and the system generates correctly formatted import files for all three systems simultaneously.

Janet responded positively to this ("that's beautiful") and started stress-testing it herself. Her main concern: she currently uses Ordova as the internal-first check — she enters into Ordova before pushing anywhere else, to make sure the company's system of record is always accurate before anything appears on the distributor websites or the retail page. A single-input approach would need to maintain that same discipline.

The refined version they landed on: Ordova stays the starting point and source of truth. The change is what happens after — instead of manually exporting and re-importing for each downstream system, an AI-assisted step generates the distributor catalog import files automatically from the Ordova record. One transformation step instead of two manual chains.

The same logic applies to pricing updates, which follow the same Ordova-first → push downstream pattern.

Ordova API

Nate noted that Megan had a meeting with the Ordova rep recently, and he had asked her to inquire about API documentation. If the API exposes read and write operations, it could enable a more automated bridge — rather than running Excel import/export chains, the system could push directly to the distributor catalogs when a product is created or updated in Ordova. The answer from the Ordova rep is still pending.

Process Standardization

Nate noted at the end of the conversation that regardless of how the technical workflow evolves, having a documented and agreed-upon process for product entry — accessible to everyone who does it — would be valuable on its own. Right now, different people do it differently, and there's no shared reference. Standardizing the process (even without any AI component) would reduce the data integrity problems Janet is spending time cleaning up.

Follow-Ups

• Get the Ordova API documentation from Megan — this determines which automated options are feasible
• Ask Janet to share the existing product entry checklist
• Get the two distributor catalog Excel import templates — these define the field schemas needed for the transformer
• Ask Janet (or Megan) how many products are currently in Ordova but not on the distributor catalogs — this sizes the catalog expansion opportunity