Imagine you get on your system one morning, and it appears as if all of your customers are conspiring against you. Everyone seems to be sending you orders that you can’t process for one reason or another. One customer is sending order files with made-up fields. Another is sending files that are not formatted correctly so you can’t parse them. And yet another is sending alpha characters in an amount field. What’s more, you and your customers have all agreed to an industry-wide standard on how to exchange data. I have had all of these things happen to me. If not on the same day, then definitely in the same week. What would make all of your trading partners go restless at the same time?
A change in the computer standard
I can’t emphasize enough how much you should read “the book“. (Although I am going to continue to try. Plus it makes a great gift.). The very first thing I start off talking about is computer standards. Here is the very first paragraph of the very first chapter.
Standards are good. When people use standards, it is great. If people were to use standards in a standard way it would be Nirvana. Alas, Nirvana is a mythical place that doesn’t really exist. There are a lot of people that put in a great deal of time and effort to develop standards to hopefully meet the needs of business. When these get turned loose in the wild, however, you will be amazed at how things actually get implemented.
When a computer standard is first defined, and businesses are implementing them for the first time, they are generally careful and take the time to test with their trading partners. But, as a standard gets some age on it and people get more comfortable with things, they may not be so careful when changing over to a newer version of the same standard. The thinking is “hey we are just adding some new fields here, and some new enumerated values there, no big deal”. On the surface that sounds logical, but boy oh boy, if everyone is making changes at the same time; and the expertise being uneven across the playing field, businesses can be impacted.
Once a company implements a computer standard; after having spent the time, money, and effort, it can be difficult to get them to upgrade. If there are regulations involved, however, and you won’t be allowed to conduct business unless you make the change, then the change will happen. Since all regulations come with a time-frame/deadline and everyone will wait till the last second to implement, there will be a whole lot-a-change happening at the same time.
This is the situation I am finding myself in now. Regulations have been made, the deadline has passed, and now the changes (or should I say issues) are starting to come out of the woodwork.
What is a service provider suppose to do?
This is a real question. I don’t think I have a good answer for this situation. The standard I am having these issues with is an XML standard. We could potentially stop doing a schema validation on the data we receive. That would fix the problem with having extraneous tags in the XML file. But it would do nothing to resolve the problem of the XML being formatted incorrectly (missing end tags). Also, you would be opening yourself up to just accepting any-ole-thing into your back-end process. Not an ideal situation.
Needless to say, not being able to process orders has a real business impact. And just saying that it is not your fault, even though it isn’t, is not going to win you any favors with the “higher-ups”. Anyone working in the EDI space already knows you get shouldered with a lot of blame for things that you have no control over.
To complicate matters even more, the originator of the bad data could be one or two hops away from you in the business transaction. If your customer is using a thrid party product to generate the data they are sending you, telling them that there is a problem with their vendor could just be barking at the moon.
Relationships
This is where you will need to lean on your relationships to help get things resolved. Get the salespeople involved with your direct customers. They should already have a relationship with the customer and know who and how to interact with them.
On the vendor side hopefully you have had contact with some of them at conferences or sales meetings. You should have a Rolodex of people you can reach out to. Or you know someone in your company that has the contacts. You will need to reach out to them. Be very specific about what you are seeing, and why it is a problem. You will have to do this problem by problem, and vendor by vendor.
Take two aspirin.
I wish that I had better, more concrete advice to offer. Like take two pills and a nap, and it will all be better. Although that may do you some good, it will do nothing to get your orders flowing again.
I would love to hear similar situations that others have had with computer standards and solutions that have been formulated. Leave your comments below and help us all learn something.