How to Upload Partner Data

Overview

This procedure allows you to perform a bulk upload, importing a .CSV file into Zift PRM.

The procedure to load data into Zift PRM is very precise. Zift Solutions highly recommends that you perform this procedure in three stages.

1. Upload a small representative sample of the data to your recently refreshed staging environment.
2. If there are no issues, upload the complete data set to your staging site as a final pre-production test.
3. If no issues have been previously detected, repeat in your production environment.

Before You Begin

Log into the Zift PRM Admin site with dataTask:2 and dataloadsTask:1 or higher.

Bulk Upload Data into Zift PRM

The procedure to load data into Zift PRM is very precise. Zift Solutions highly recommends that you perform this procedure in four stages.

Clean your data.

All data should be cleaned before importing into Zift PRM. This includes removing duplicates, validating data such as email addresses, and ensuring consistency of spelling and formatting of data.

It is much easier to clean the data while it is in a spreadsheet and this should be done before import as a matter of best practice.

Complete the Data Load Screen

This is a sub-procedure of the Bulk Load Data into Zift PRM procedure.

1. Navigate to Accounts >Load Data.
2. Complete the Load Data screen.

These are the parameters that control Bulk Data Load.

Label	Type	Description
DataSourceID	Text	Autogenerated by Zift PRM
Description of the data to load	Text	An informative description of this data load
The country records will be linked to if not specified	Drop-down List	This is the default country to link a record to if no country is specified.
Date data received	Date Selector	Date to tag the records with. This defaults to the current date but can be backdated if required.
The type of data being loaded	Drop-down List	Select which type of person is included in the data load.
The type of organisations in the data being loaded	Drop-down List	Select which type of organization is included in the data load. Figure: Data Load Parameters screen

 

The Bulk Data Load .CSV file

Information about the .CSV file that must be constructed to perform a bulk Data upload.

When performing a bulk upload of data, it is critical that Zift PRM recognize what the data relates to. To ensure this, you can download Data Load Template Worksheet and adapt your data to the format. Your file must include the required fields but not all the fields in the worksheet provided. We have also attached a simple .CSV file that you can use. 

Tips

• Take care to clean your data by removing any duplicates or any inconsistencies. This is easier to do in the worksheet where you can see all your data in a single view than once it is in Zift PRM.
• Note in the .CSV file sample, we included Account Manager. This actually refers to the Customer (or Supplier) Account Manager and should already be in the system. This field is an integer field and therefore requires that you input the PersonID for each Account Manager, rather than the name.  
• There are four header rows in the Data Load Template Worksheet:

Row	Contains	Remove prior to import?
1	Zift PRM field label as shown in the Admin site	Yes
2	Salesforce.com equivalent to row 1 values.	Yes
3	Zift PRM field names. Do not edit the values in this row. You can add values to the row but they must exactly match the relevant field or Profile names in Zift PRM. There should be no spaces in these cells.	No
4	Instructions for the specific column.	Yes

• Do not modify the order of columns. You may add new columns to the end of the spreadsheet if required but you should not modify the existing columns.
• CSV files use commas to differentiate between records so you must remove any commas in your data. If you do not remove commas from your data, any data after the comma will be off-set to the next field.
• Add a new column at the end of the CSV file that can be used to identify the data included in the current upload. You will need to create a corresponding Profile for this column. This will allow you to create Target Lists from this upload data.
• Required columns are highlighted in red. You must enter a value in this column for each row. If you are not able to provide validated information for a mandatory field, enter a non-null value, for example 00000 for the zip code. This should be a last resort but any blanks in a required column will generate errors. You should also use the same non-null value for all substitute values in a column. This will make it easier to identify them later. Any empty optional columns should be removed from the spreadsheet prior to importing.
• Ensure that the remaining data does not contain any hidden or non-printing characters that may have been created if the data originated in a different system such as Salesforce.
• Note: Use Notepad++ to find hidden characters then use the =clean or =trim MS Excel functions to clean the data.
• Each line in the data file will include the data for a Person-Location-Organization record and result in up to 3 new records in Zift PRM. If any records already exist, they will be skipped. For example, if you are adding 30 new people to a Location, the Location and Organization record will be created when the first Person is added and then linked to subsequent people. This is why it is important to clean the data before you perform the upload: it ensures that duplicates will be recognized as such. For example, the following spreadsheet rows would result in two different location records:

First Name	Last Name	Email	Location Name	Address 1	City	Region	Postal Code	Country
Mary	Peters	[e-mail]	Acme Inc.	3 Fifth Avenue	New York	NY	10001	United States
John	Sanders	[e-mail]	Acme Inc.	3 5th Ave.	New York	NY	10001	USA

Data Load CSV Template