How Alchemie built App Catálogo on NetSuite for Zapatería Fratello — turning a manual, error-prone seasonal process into an automated matrix-SKU and purchase-order engine. Running stable for 8 years.
Before the tech: the outcome. Fratello is a Mexican footwear manufacturer and retailer with national and international operations, eCommerce and marketplaces. Every season the buying team faces the same wall — thousands of samples, a narrow selection window, and a native ERP that can't keep up.
A sample-selection process that used to take a week of manual registration now runs in a fraction of the time — the season gets to market faster.
Manual re-keying between HQ and warehouses is gone. Every item is traceable from supplier sample to live catalog, synced with eCommerce and marketplaces.
Eight years in production, handling thousands of SKUs without saturating the ERP. Built to scale, maintained and evolved season after season.
Fratello receives 3,000+ supplier samples per season and selects only a fraction. The whole pipeline — registering samples, curating the selection, creating matrix SKUs (model + size runs), generating hundreds of purchase orders, labeling, and controlling inventory — ran manually between HQ in Querétaro and the warehouses in León.
Native NetSuite modules simply weren't built for this shape of work: mass matrix SKUs with size and color, size-distributed procurement, automated PO generation, and access control and traceability across stores and warehouses. The result was a bottleneck — sample selection alone took a full week of manual registration.
A single guided flow — from the sample on the table to a live product and its purchase order in NetSuite.
The hard part isn't the UI — it's creating 1,500 matrix items and 1,500 POs in bulk without saturating the ERP or hitting governance limits. Here's how it's built.
An iPad-friendly single-page app embedded in a Suitelet container. Fast scan-and-select UX for the buying team, right where the samples are.
A Suitelet exposes clean GET/POST endpoints — no Restlets. The SPA talks to NetSuite through a controlled, native surface.
Work-in-progress lives in custom records — Temp Items, Temp POs, Season — so the ERP stays clean until data is final. This is what keeps NetSuite fast.
On approval, Map/Reduce scripts create products and POs in bulk, respecting SuiteScript governance limits. 1,500 items and 1,500 orders, reliably.
Parent product + size/color variants generated automatically, with per-size quantity distribution and full tech sheet and history.
A robust, scalable architecture that has run in production for 8 years and keeps evolving with the business.
Fratello is one of many. If native NetSuite is holding a process back, tell us about it — an architect will reply.
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