Data Pipeline Engineering
Automated ETL and ELT pipelines, managed SFTP servers with 2FA, and quality gates that keep planning data complete and current.
Life Sciences
Commercial and clinical data arrives from dozens of specialty pharmacies, wholesalers, hubs, and claims aggregators on different schedules and formats. We build secure, automated pipelines that ingest, validate, and normalize every feed before it reaches your warehouse or forecast.
What we factor in
- Specialty pharmacy and hub feeds
- Wholesaler EDI 852 and 867
- Longitudinal patient claims (APLD)
- SFTP with 2FA and PGP encryption
- Schema drift and late partner files
- HIPAA de-identification gates
Managed SFTP with 2FA
Hardened partner drop zones with MFA and encryption
We provision and manage dedicated SFTP servers protected by two-factor authentication (SSH key plus TOTP/MFA), IP allowlisting, chroot directory isolation, and automated PGP decryption as soon as partner files land.
What it gives you: Give specialty pharmacies, wholesalers, and data vendors a secure, audit-ready drop zone.
Multi-partner aggregation
Specialty pharmacy, hub, and distributor feeds
Each specialty pharmacy and patient hub uses its own layout, patient status codes, and delivery cadence. Our pipelines standardize every partner feed into one canonical schema with patient and account cross-walking.
What it gives you: View starts, refills, and dispenses across your entire distribution network in one table.
852 and 867 channel pipelines
Wholesaler inventory and sales-out automation
Automated ingestion of EDI 852 product activity and 867 sales-out files reconciles wholesaler receipts, inventory on hand, and downstream pharmacy or hospital shipments daily and weekly.
What it gives you: Keep sell-in versus demand models and weeks-on-hand dashboards current without manual file prep.
Pre-load quality gates
Quarantine and schema validation
Every incoming file is checked for row counts, date completeness, NDC formatting, duplicate records, and sudden volume spikes before loading. Malformed files are quarantined with instant alerts to the data team.
What it gives you: Catch late or corrupted vendor files at the gate before they distort a brand forecast.
De-identified clinical and claims flows
Tokenized APLD and JSON trial pipelines
Pipelines integrate HIPAA-aligned de-identification and longitudinal token matching inline, stripping protected health information and normalizing JSON or flat-file claims before landing in analytics tables.
What it gives you: Analyze longitudinal patient journeys safely without exposing sensitive identifiers.
SLA monitoring and runbooks
Automated retries, dead-letter queues, and hand-off
We instrument every pipeline job with execution logs, SLA timers, automated retries for transient network drops, and clear operational runbooks so your internal IT team or ours can run it with confidence.
What it gives you: Know immediately when a partner feed is late and how to resolve it in minutes.
Consumer Goods & Retail
High-velocity retail and CPG planning depends on daily point-of-sale feeds, ERP shipments, open orders, and warehouse inventory arriving on time and aligning to the same product and customer hierarchy.
What we factor in
- NielsenIQ and Circana POS feeds
- Retailer EDI and portal exports
- ERP shipments, orders, and inventory
- Promotional calendars and deal costs
- SKU and account hierarchy mapping
- Cloud and on-premises scheduling
Syndicated and retailer POS ingestion
NielsenIQ, Circana, and direct retail feeds
We automate the retrieval, validation, and loading of syndicated scanner data alongside direct retailer POS and inventory feeds into your planning warehouse.
What it gives you: Start every weekly planning cycle with reconciled sell-through data already loaded.
ERP to forecasting pipelines
Automated feeds for RoadMap GPS, TrailBlazer, and Geneva API
Scheduled pipelines extract historical shipments, open orders, on-hand inventory, and item master updates from SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, or Dynamics and load them directly into RoadMap forecasting tools.
What it gives you: Eliminate manual CSV exports and spreadsheet copy-paste before running forecasts.
Secure B2B file exchange
SFTP servers with 2FA for retail and 3PL partners
For retail partners, co-manufacturers, and 3PL warehouses that exchange flat files or EDI batches, we stand up 2FA-protected SFTP endpoints with event-driven ingestion triggers and archive retention.
What it gives you: Replace unsecured email attachments and brittle FTP scripts with governed transfers.
Hierarchy and calendar normalization
Retail 4-4-5, weekly, and monthly alignment
Pipelines automatically translate UPCs to internal SKU codes, map ship-to locations to retail banners, and align retail 4-4-5 calendars with fiscal months so POS and shipment histories match period for period.
What it gives you: Compare sell-in shipments and sell-through POS on the exact same calendar and hierarchy.
In-flight data quality controls
Anomaly detection and unit-of-measure checks
Automated rules verify cases-to-eaches conversions, currency rates, price bounds, and missing store reports during the ETL run, flagging exceptions before downstream batch forecasts execute.
What it gives you: Prevent a single bad unit conversion or missing banner file from skewing thousands of SKU forecasts.
Cloud and on-premises orchestration
SQL Server, Snowflake, Oracle, and hybrid scheduling
Whether your data lives in on-premises Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle databases, or in Snowflake, Azure, or AWS, we build pipelines native to your stack with full version control and documentation.
What it gives you: Run reliable data pipelines on the infrastructure your security and IT policies require.
End-to-end pipeline architecture from drop zone to forecast
A forecasting model is only as reliable as the pipeline feeding it. When data arrives late, changes format without warning, or requires hours of manual spreadsheet cleanup every Monday morning, planners lose valuable cycle time. RoadMap engineers automated cloud, on-premises, and hybrid ETL/ELT pipelines that handle ingestion, security, quality control, and delivery as a single governed workflow.
| Pipeline Stage | What We Build | Built-In Controls |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Secure Ingestion & SFTP w/ 2FA | Managed SFTP servers with two-factor authentication (SSH key + TOTP/MFA), REST API connectors, database CDC, and EDI/syndicated feed pullers | IP allowlisting, chroot isolation, TLS 1.3 / SSHv2 transport, and automatic PGP/GPG decryption |
| 2. Pre-Load Validation & Quarantine | Automated gatekeeper checks on every file and batch before it touches production tables | Row-count bounds, schema drift detection, primary-key uniqueness, date-gap checks, and quarantine routing |
| 3. Normalization & Hierarchy Mapping | SQL, Python, and stored-procedure transformations across cloud or on-premises warehouses | NDC/UPC-to-SKU cross-walks, unit-of-measure conversion, 4-4-5 calendar alignment, and HIPAA de-identification |
| 4. Forecast & ERP Delivery | Scheduled loads into RoadMap GPS, RoadMap GPS 360, TrailBlazer, the Geneva API, and ERP write-back | Execution audit logs, SLA timers, dead-letter retries, and alerting via email, Slack, or Teams |
Managed SFTP servers with Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
Many enterprise and life science data exchanges still rely on file transfers from specialty pharmacies, 3PLs, wholesalers, and syndicated data providers. RoadMap provisions and operates hardened SFTP environments so your team never has to manage brittle file servers:
- Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): Enforces public-key authentication combined with time-based one-time passwords (TOTP) or enterprise MFA so stolen credentials alone cannot access partner directories.
- Partner isolation & encryption: Each external partner is restricted to an isolated chroot directory with strict IP allowlisting, PGP/GPG file encryption in transit, and AES-256 encryption at rest.
- Event-driven pipeline triggers: As soon as a partner file finishes uploading, the pipeline verifies its checksum and signature, archives the raw encrypted payload for audit lineage, and triggers validation and warehouse loading automatically.
Frequently asked questions
What is data pipeline engineering?
Data pipeline engineering builds the automated flows that move data from source systems and external partners into data warehouses and forecasting tools. RoadMap Technologies designs cloud and on-premises ETL/ELT pipelines, sets up hardened SFTP servers with two-factor authentication (2FA), and enforces automated quality gates, SLAs, monitoring, and runbooks so forecasts always run on complete, current data.
Can RoadMap set up and manage secure SFTP servers with two-factor authentication (2FA)?
Yes. We provision and operate hardened SFTP servers with two-factor authentication (SSH key plus TOTP/MFA), IP allowlisting, chroot directory isolation for each external partner, and automatic PGP/GPG decryption that triggers ingestion as soon as files arrive.
What happens when an external data partner sends a late or malformed file?
Every pipeline includes automated pre-load quality gates checking row counts, schema drift, date completeness, and duplicate keys. If a file fails validation or misses its SLA window, it is quarantined before touching production tables and an immediate alert is sent with diagnostic details.
Which healthcare and retail data feeds do your pipelines handle?
In life sciences, we ingest specialty pharmacy dispenses, patient hub status files, EDI 852/867 wholesaler movements, and anonymized patient-level claims (APLD). In consumer goods and retail, we ingest NielsenIQ and Circana POS feeds, retailer EDI, 3PL inventory, and ERP shipment actuals.
Who operates the data pipelines after they are built?
We can operate and monitor the pipelines for you under an agreed SLA, or deploy them inside your environment with complete documentation, source control, alerting, and runbooks for your internal data engineering team.
Tell us about your data
We route you to the right data engineer, scope the work, and build with security in mind from the first conversation.