Story 2: The Costly Discovery

A record company was happily filling orders for their CDs to a major retail store chain, happy to have such a high volume customer.  The AR Department found that a number of invoices were not being paid, most piling up in the six month overdue category.

The investigation showed that the invoices were being rejected by the customer and many EDI messages notifying them of this had been sent.  The messages were not being processed by the record company's system with the same scrutiny as other transactions so no one in the EDI group noticed.

After a great many hours and many meetings most of the $6,000,000.00 was recovered, an accidental interest free loan to their customer costing over $150,000.00 in lost interest.  The greater loss was the need to negotiate with a large customer because to the record company's EDI system shortfalls.   Their service image is still under repair.