While working with a client on developing EDI-856 transactions with one of their trading partners, an error occurred that cost my client thousands of dollars in charge back fines.
In their SAP environment they produce a single DESADV IDoc per order/purchase order. This could amount to several hundred DESADV IDocs being generated. The initial development was a 1 to 1 translation in that each DESADV IDoc that was produced would be translated into a single EDI-856 document.
Because of a single data error, due to department procedures not being followed in the warehouse in the closing of orders, the bad data element resulted and was repeated throughout all of the DESADV IDocs that were generated. Translation of the IDocs was successful because this error was not conceived at the point of map development. The hundreds of translated documents were sent to the trading partner and subsequently resulted in failed documents.
Because the trading partner generated a charge back for each document sent, my client was billed thousands of dollars in charge back fines. This simple example shows how a single error repeated in each document can turn out to be a very costly problem.
I hope to show you in the next few postings how to bundle the IDocs together to:
- Bundle and reduce the number of IDocs being translated
- Reduce the number of EDI documents being sent to the trading partner
- Minimize the charge back cost, should and error occur
