Graduation Thank Yous July 14, 2008
Posted by Meg Sewell in News.Tags: Trading Partner lists, Trading Partners, VAN
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Image Source: http://jdorganizer.blogspot.com
Today’s post comes from David Smith, CSM II in Services-Enablement at Inovis.
My daughter just graduated from High School, receiving beaucoup graduation gifts from family and friends. Part of the graduation party activity was recording who-gave-what so she could send thank you cards. This was challenging at times, especially for presenters’ gifts brought to the house whose card listed a name, but no address. The ‘challenge’ was trying to locate up-to-date addresses in our address book for the thank you cards. Half way through a long afternoon of Google / 411 searches for addresses, a sense of déjà vu clicked in… How many times have I encountered out-of-date Trading Partner lists for clients migrating to the Inovis VAN?
When was the last time you validated your list of Trading Partners on your translator / VAN against current activity to weed out those with whom you’re no longer doing business? For those that are active, do you have a valid contact (name, e-mail, phone)? Even better than john.doe@tp.com, do your trading partners use a generic EDI@tp.com e-mail so they may change staffing and yet still have availability to their partners? Does YOUR organization use a generic e-mail to allow always-current availability? Like matching the gifts to the givers, are your lists of forms / mapping guidelines accurate for each trading partner?
While all of my client migrations eventually are successful, those who keep their trading partner relationships up-to-date allow me to quickly and efficiently on-board their account. Our household address book is now up-to-date, and—for the time being—we have accurate contacts for friends and family. Now I’ve got four years to keep the address book up-to-date before College graduation thank yous start the process over again…
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This is a timely post–on Friday I sent out an EDI Survey to the contacts that we had listed for all of our trading partners. Only a small percentage of our trading partners list a “generic” EDI contact email address and/or phone number; for most it is an individual’s email address.
While I tried to “vet” the addresses before sending–by looking through recent emails from the trading partners–of about 140 emails sent, I got an immediate 15 or so “delivery failures”, or about 10%.
What do you think? Is a 10% failure rate good? Bad?
David doesn’t have a blog profile, so he sent his response to me.
Bob,
I’m guessing many companies find as high as 30-40% out-of-date contacts when we assign the task of loading the trading partner spreadsheet, and spend a week to 10 days cleaning the data before giving the spreadsheet to me. I’ve still seen 10% AFTER receipt of a client trading partner list.
I think 10% isn’t bad, and positions you as one of the ‘better’ organized clients. Since we can’t control what our trading partners use as their Contact e-mail, I doubt we’ll ever achieve lower than 5-8% out-of-date at any given time.
David