How to Automate SP Richards and Educators Resource Before Back-to-School

If you're running SP Richards and/or Educators Resource on spreadsheets and manual FTP pulls, back-to-school is the deadline that turns a tolerable process into a crisis. The good news: you don't have to keep doing it by hand. 

Here's how the two feeds actually work, where they collide once both are live, and what it takes to automate them before the rush, so back to school office supply ecommerce stops being the season you dread.

Why Back-To-School Breaks Manual Operations

Back-to-school isn't a single week in August. It builds through the summer and arrives earlier every year. The planning takeaway is simple: if most of your customers are buying in early July, your feeds, listings, and order routing have to be ready in June, not August. 

When that spike lands on a manual process, it strains in predictable ways. Picture a normal month two people can keep up with, then a peak that triples your order count (a realistic scenario, used here to make the cost visible). 

Suddenly you have:

• Three times the purchase orders to hand-key, and three times the chances to mistype a quantity.
• Three times the windows where stock changes between the moment you check a feed and the moment you place the order, so oversells climb.
• Temporary hires you have to train during the busiest weeks of the year, who still ship late.

A process that merely creaks in a normal month is underwater at peak. Automated routing, by contrast, treats the spike as ordinary demand because no one is typing orders in the first place.

How SP Richards Feeds Work 

Educators Resource is the classic second source for school-supply dealers, and it behaves a little differently which is exactly why Educators Resource EDI automation trips people up. Based on the setup in your brief 

• Inventory arrives as a file drop over FTP rather than a live API call. 
• Ordering runs as EDI over FTP. EDI documents exchanged through the FTP connection.
• The Catch: a 5–7 day lead time. This is the detail that quietly breaks delivery promises. If your routing and your customer-facing ship estimates don't account for that replenishment lag, you'll promise dates Educators Resource can't support, especially when peak demand is already stretching everyone. 

The practical implication: Educators Resource can't be treated as instantly available the way a live, in-stock source is. Your routing rules have to know the difference. 

The SKU Overlap Problem When Both are Live

The moment both feeds run, the same item shows up twice, a ream of paper on the SP Richards feed and the Educators Resource feed, each with its own cost, its own stock level, and (as above) its own lead time. Decide by hand and three things go wrong over time:

• You oversell, because the feed you checked said "in stock" and the one you fulfilled from didn't.
• You lose margin, because you routed to the pricier source out of habit.
• You ship from the wrong supplier, because the cheapest in-stock option was on a feed nobody looked at.

The obvious fix, "assign each SKU a preferred supplier", holds for a few hundred items and falls apart past a few thousand, because cost and stock change daily and a static preference can't keep up.

What an Automated Setup Looks Like End-To-End

The fix is to stop choosing by hand and start choosing by rule. End to end, an automated stack does this:

• Pulls both feeds into one master catalog. SP Richards' XML and Educators Resource's FTP file land in a single source of truth.
• Dedupes overlapping items into one master SKU, so every version of a product is tied together.
• Routes each order by rule. In-stock first, then the lowest-cost distributor that actually has it, with Educators Resource's lead time factored in so you never promise what it can't deliver on time.
• Fires the EDI purchase order automatically to the right supplier, in that supplier's format, with tracking flowing back on its own.

Both SP Richards and Educators Resource connect as pre-built sources on platforms like Flxpoint, so the overlap stops being a daily guessing game and becomes a setting and back-to-school becomes a volume number, not a fire drill.

See if You're Ready Before July

You don't have to connect everything to feel the difference. Take one supplier which will ideally be your new anchor and once it goes from manual to automated, watch it work through one peak, and repeat.

Bring your supplier list and we'll show you which distributors connect today, which need a custom build, and what your routing would look like before back-to-school hits.

Connect with Flxpoint today!

Flxpoint – Powerful Dropship and Ecommerce Automation Platform