Correction processes for flawed EDI data Part I

Flawed or missing EDI data may endanger business processes and partly require considerable manual rework. As temporary outages may occur even at reliable partners, it will be worthwhile in many cases to think about correction processes for flawed EDI data.

Before you define specific processes, you should think about the consequences of missing or flawed messages. Can you live with a certain percentage of all documents not being usable for your company? Then it will probably suffice if you instruct your partners in a way that they can solve the problem in the near future. If every single message counts however, you should shape the process in a way that a later supply or the correction of the messages is possible within a few hours. Once the process has been defined all over, it should answer how the partners are pointed to errors and how they should react to them.

For processes with a certain margin of error, sending error reports via automatically generated emails, trough APIs or by means of the EDIFACT message types CONTRL or APERAK is advisable. We will show you how you can use the latter and how they differ in the second part of our series.

All these communication methods have in common that they do not necessarily evoke an immediate reaction because the receiver may potentially read the message with delay. Therefore, you should expect any improvement only after a couple of days. Just as well, you should at least dig deeper at random whether the reports are noticed and considered. Such a test case will also be useful at the on-boarding of new EDI partners.

As reaction, the sender should tackle the root cause of the problem. A number of reasons comes into consideration for this, flawed master data, a wrong creation of the data in the ERP system, a mapping error or an outage of the transmission technology amongst others. The correction process is finished as soon as the problem has been fixed. If the problem lasts, it is often helpful to insist at the partner on a problem solution with the help of suitable colleagues. Especially your purchasing department should be able to provide support.

Measures for critical processes will require short reaction times as a general rule. Here it makes sense to ask the partner for a list of contacts that are reliably accessible via telephone. It may be even more efficient to send automatically created SMS where the recipient is requested to make contact with you by themselves.

As corrective action for the root cause of the error may often not be feasible at short notice, one solution may be to fix the flawed message on your or the sender's side by hand in a text editor and reprocess it afterwards. Before you do that, you have to check however whether technical or legal obstacles prevent such a procedure. After the direct symptoms have been cured, you can repair the underlying root causes with the measures that we have introduced in the antecedent chapter.

Especially the measures to cover critical processes demand a quick reaction and a high degree of cooperation by the data senders. To guarantee these reliably, you should establish contractual foundations, else you depend on the goodwill of your partners. In any case, you should inquire from time to time whether they are familiar with the correction processes and whether they could execute them in case of an error.

Please find here part II of our series.