Story 3: Outsmarting Yourself-The EDI Game

A mid sized manufacturing company felt they had finally ‘beaten' EDI problems by circumventing their own technology.  They intensively trained every person in order entry to understand and be able to read raw EDI data and to compare it to data imported into their SAP system.  Despite the considerable increase in the time and labor costs of entering orders, the company felt that the approach could considerably reduce overall costs.  They were very proud of the work they had accomplished, and to their credit the company performed better that many of their competitors in EDI data flow with their customers.

Unfortunately, a close analysis revealed that they were not without problems.  In one instance they received a blanket purchase order for a considerable amount of goods from a large retail chain.  The order came in November with the first delivery due in May and was large enough that it required complex planning and additional investment to complete.

On the day when the first trucks were due to arrive many of the other customer's orders had been rescheduled or moved to a later time in the day.  The warehouse floor was full of prepackaged goods for quick loading.   But no truck came.  The trucking company, when called, explained that none had been requested by their customer.

After a few calls to the retailer it turned out the order had been cancelled just prior to midnight the day before via an electronic message which was automatically accepted by the EDI system.  The people whose job was to manually review all EDI transactions had not seen this before and ignored it.  The customer claimed that since they accepted the cancellation they had no responsibility for the order.