Chapter 126: Resolving Legacy Issues-A Cat for Every Cat Owner(Wise as snow, cold as ice.)

The agenda of this meeting was to discuss the feasibility and potential implementation of creating backend tags.

The young man sitting next to Liao Yingying was the first to gain control of the screen, projecting his presentation onto the whiteboard and beginning to speak at length about his team’s definitions and concepts for these backend tags. As a representative for the data analysts, Cheng Yu interjected from time to time, offering supplements and technical explanations to the presentation.

"Well, we understand your vision. But couldn't you just categorize and tag these things yourselves? Why call us here specifically... what exactly can we provide?"

Once the first group finished their presentation, Liang Min, the business manager for the womenswear category, could not help but ask. Throughout the introduction, she had failed to see how this project related to the suppliers she worked with, nor did she feel it warranted such a large, cross-departmental meeting.

With the main battlefield of the Double Eleven shopping festival about to commence, the business departments for each category were already spinning in circles trying to meet their KPIs. Being summoned here just to listen to a lot of fluff was starting to make her genuinely angry.

"No, no, Sister Min, this does actually concern you," Chen Xujia stepped in to explain further.

To analyze products, they first needed data on various dimensions, and these "dimensions" were of paramount importance. Backend tags differed significantly from the product tags displayed to users on the frontend.

Chen Xujia immediately used clothing colors as an example to explain the distinction to Liang Min. On the frontend, users could select clothes based on personal preference, such as black, white, gray, or Morandi color palettes. The backend, however, would create a collection—for instance, a tag for "trending colors"—where the specific colors included in that set could be updated at any time.

"But what does that have to do with us? Regarding the color tags or trending color tags you mentioned, I’m no expert, but surely you can achieve that through data alone? You don't need us to draw conclusions about which colors are selling well; you can pull that from the database yourselves, probably even faster than we could."

"Yes, yes, exactly," Chen Xujia said, hurrying to soothe her. "Once the tags are established, the content within them can indeed be updated automatically through algorithms. The problem is that we don't currently have a clear record of what colors our products actually are."

Although the first Commercial Operations group had urgently conducted a detailed review of frontend product tags before the pre-sale, even drilling down to the fourth and fifth category levels, these tags would remain empty shells if the suppliers did not report their information accurately on their supply lists.

With the issue laid out plainly, Liang Min finally understood their point. It was true; when negotiating with suppliers in the past, her department had often adopted a submissive stance, never setting strict requirements for the forms provided to them. Even if a supplier filled them out with errors or omissions, they dared not send them back for corrections. If such an action were to offend a client and cause them to stop renewing their contracts, it would be a classic case of losing the big picture to save a trifle.

It was precisely this "turning a blind eye" that had resulted in the inconsistent and fragmented product information records in the backend. Some metrics were so riddled with gaps that they were completely unusable.

To put it bluntly, the legacy problems were too vast, and this task would ultimately require the business department colleagues to step in and handle it themselves.