Give us your problems Part III

Imagine it is Friday afternoon and a cargo plane is parked on a airfield with your goods on board. The customs officer will knock off work in one hour and the customs broker is still waiting for your data regarding the goods to be declared. Meanwhile, the airline company explains to you the costs if the airplane has to be parked the whole weekend.

Sure, this is an extreme case but flawed EDI data can cause costs in many processes. In the automotive industry, data senders may be punished with fines for faulty or missing delivery notes and in wholesale, some debtors pay only after they have received a correct invoice via EDI.

Flawed EDI data may also cause non-financial costs especially within the automotive industry, if suppliers receive a degradation of their rating due to their low EDI data quality. As described in part II of our series, relevant labor expense accumulates in addition, if such problems occur on a regular basis.

The most elegant solution for problems with EDI data is planning: Take the time to subject your interfaces to a risk analysis. In the process, you can draw on different criteria: Which interface is especially time critical, where is money involved the most, which data recipient reacts especially sensitive to missing or flawed EDI data?

Next, you can establish emergency plans. They include for example telephone lists with fitting contacts or technical measures like for example an alternative transmission protocol if the data cannot be sent via the regular way. Quite often, your partners are interested in a high data quality just like you and support these plannings.

If the emergency happens, you can react quickly and with fitting measures in ideal circumstances. Unfortunately, reality does not always stick to that script and problems occur that have not been taken into consideration. Even then, you benefit from being able to connect your specialists quickly with the help of a telephone list. Together, they will often find improvisations that defuse the problem at least in the short term.

If time is of the essence and if EDI data has to be adjusted by hand within a text editor, at least the error checking should not be done manually. With our validation API, you get the result of an automated check of the structure and the content of a file within seconds. That way, you improve your reaction times and can often send rectified data just in time.

By the way: The case with the cargo plane really happened, it could be solved through the cooperation of experts literally last-minute.