To: Dr. Priya Sharma, Inventory Optimisation working group
From: Marcus Kim, Chief Information Officer
Priya asked IT for a frank assessment of what our legacy estate can and cannot feed an AI forecasting platform. Short version: the data exists, but getting it out cleanly and frequently enough is the hard part.
The estate
| System | Vendor / age | Integration surface |
|---|---|---|
| Point of Sale | RetailMaster, deployed 2014 | No public API; nightly flat-file export only |
| Inventory / stock control | StockTrak, deployed 2011 | Direct DB read possible; no documented schema |
| Purchasing | Mix of StockTrak + spreadsheets | Largely manual |
| Online | Shopify Plus | Full REST/GraphQL API, no concerns |
What is feasible
- Read access to StockTrak via a nightly replicated copy, doable in weeks. We will not query the production database directly; it cannot take the load.
- POS sales history via the existing flat-file export, landed into a staging area. Workable, but it is yesterday's data, not live.
- Shopify integration is trivial and already partly built.
What is not feasible (without significant work)
- Real-time store stock. RetailMaster only emits a batch file overnight. Intraday stock movements are invisible until the next morning. Replenishment logic must tolerate a 24-hour lag.
- Clean joins across systems. StockTrak and the POS use different SKU formats and there is no shared product key. Reconciliation is a project in itself, not a config setting.
- Writing back automated reorder suggestions into StockTrak. The vendor is end-of-support; we would build a fragile integration. Initial pilot should surface suggestions to humans, not auto-commit.
Caution: StockTrak is out of vendor support as of mid-2024. Any extraction we build is unsupported and undocumented. We have one person, Raj Patel, who knows its schema; that is a key-person risk.
Note: I support Priya's single-category pilot. It lets us validate the nightly extraction and SKU reconciliation on a small slice before we attempt anything estate-wide. A full POS replacement is a separate, larger conversation for FY27.
IT can have the StockTrak replica and a Shopify feed standing in a staging environment within roughly six weeks of go-ahead.
Marcus Kim, Chief Information Officer