"rog" wrote:
It's because every company does business differently. The alternative
is no standard, or a standard with thousands of elements rather than
hundreds of optional elements provided.

Here are examples of what needs to be negotiated:
- Is the DTM (DateTime stamp) the time the item was put on the dock or
the time it left the dock? Is it the time you received the stock at
the dock or is it the time that the goods were put on the shelves and
available OnHand=Available for pulling?
- If goods aren't received by the required date/time, will the company
even take receipt? They will respond differently to your shipping
notice if they don't accept delivery.
- If you can't ship goods, do you send the line item with 0 shipped or
do you leave it off the manifest?
- Do you always trust the ShipTo for an order or do you validate it
against some table? What happens if you can't validate?
- Do you automatically generate a backorder for goods you can't ship
or are backorders cancelled?
- Are unused but required fields Null, Zero, not validated?
- How many line items can you send per 810 invoice or 850 PO? The
spec allows for many but some companies only want one line item per
EDI transaction so that they can close transactions rather than having
to close entire documents.
- What's the protocol if documents like the 997 functional
acknowledegement are not received within a specified amount of time?
Do emails get generated? Do phones start to ring? Does some manual
process kick in to ensure business continues when the power or network
lines are down?

None of this is defined in the specs. The specs contain data in
structured places. You decide the business context of the data in
those fields. And all of this needs to be documented for both trading
partners so that everyone knows exactly what's expected despite
employee turnover. Sound cumbersome? We're talking about companies
that want to ensure "down to the minute" guaranteed transactions with
minimal cost of business overhead. Obviously this isn't for small
companies. Such things are managed with attention to details, and
companies can and do spend a lot of time and money to make sure it's
done right, because the ultimate goal is to save even more.

HTH
T

Jeff,

Give Steve McGough a call @ Internet Technologies here in Wilmington, NC.
They should be willing to work with you to get something running on
D3/Linux. David McGough, the tech guru, has worked with MV at a couple of
places here so he's familiar with it, EDI, and a bunch of other neat stuff.
Tell them Glen @ All-Spec referred you. We've been a wireless Internet
client for eons. I have a D3/RH9 test box here they can use for dev if they
want. Do you have a budget that must be met?

http://www.inttek.net/inttek2/edi-industry.html
http://www.inttek.net/inttek2/edi-plus.html
http://www.inttek.net/inttek2/sas-study.html

Internet Technologies Inc
910-792-1786
select "Sales" option
If you can't get Steve, let me know and I'll hunt him down and have him
contact you.

Glen

"Jeffrey Kaufman" <jkaufman (AT) keydata (DOT) us> wrote

Thanks, Glen.

I just spoke with Steve. He says, "Hey."

We are investigating how good of a fit their software will be with ours.

Jeff

"Glen B" <dfdfg (AT) dfkjdfg (DOT) com> wrote