The Inovis Blog

Today’s post is our second guest article from Craig Dunham of Big Five Sporting Goods. Big thanks goes to Craig for contributing such a wonderful post. If you’re interested in being featured as a guest blogger on the Inovis blog, please e-mail meg.suggs@inovis.com.

Over on the EC-PB.org group on LinkedIn, Scott Gibson asks a good question regarding “EDI CONTENT VALIDATION” – and asks about validating and matching the data on your in-bound documents that are in response to your previously sent outbound documents – like an inbound ASN in response to your outbound PO.

One of the reasons that there is a need for this kind of CONTENT COMPLIANCE is because of all the odd ways of ordering and accepting merchandise or product, based upon your industry and your own corporate policies and concepts. And content compliance is very much different from the SYNTAX compliance – making sure you get this segment or that element – in that it’s the data within those elements that is worked into your systems and your inventories.

Now, if you’re a “regular reader” of some of my articles and blogs over on EDITalk, you know that I’ve got a thing for Widgets. They’re a great way of explaining a situation with as little fuss and muss and bother… And it’s fun to get into some alluring alliteration with widgets…!

So, I’m now Wayne’s Wacky World of Widgets and you are Willy’s Wonderful Widget World, a manufacturer of assorted styles, colors and sizes of Widgets… Who knew that widgets could come in so many variations! I’m one of your better customers, as I have a loyal following of world-wide wacky widget squirrel-awayers – aka collectors (gotta have that alliteration!) and they all LOVE a wonderful Willy Widget. Wow.

OK, so now I’m ordering some Widgets. I create a PO – one that I send electronically because we’re both EDI capable and compliant – for a bunch of Widgets:

Line item 1 – Widget style 001-A1 – color BLUE and size Medium – order 400
Line item 2 – Widget style 001-A1 – color BLUE and size Large – order 400
Line item 3 – Widget style 001-B2 – color GREEN and size Small – order 450
Line item 4 – Widget style 002-C1 – color RED and size X-Large – order 250.
TOTAL ORDER – 1500 widgets.

Now, Willy’s normally keeps all of the widgets in stock, and they’ve got 3 distribution centers in the country so that all orders are quickly filled and shipped. But, alas, they’re out of the BLUE widgets in the California facility, and have no GREEN widgets in Kansas and no RED widgets in Florida. So this order will be filled and will be coming from 3 different locations. It’s been a great week for widget wholesaling and they’re low on some items, but with a container of assorted widgets coming from the Widget factory in Waikiki or was it Wai-Chang province in China?

Now, they’ve created 3 shipments against a single order. And they SHOULD be sending Me 3 ASNs – one for each widget shipment – against, again, My single PO.

Here’s where the trouble comes in to play. My merchandising system can only match quantities to like quantities when it matches the ASN to the PO. So I’m going to receive ASN #1 with the blue widgets coming from Kansas, and it’s not going to match the PO, because the ASN is only for 800 units. Then I’ll receive ASN #2 for the green from Florida and ASN #3 for the red widgets from California. In all three cases, the ASNs and the PO match will fail and the ASN may not be used in my production receiving.

Now Scott Gibson’s question mentions that his VAN provider (no names) offers a program that can compare and validate that data – maybe not before it hits Scott’s ERP, but along the line and provide notification that the order, truly, is complete – because we’re getting our 1500 widgets all in from the vendor.

I know that Inovis‘ own “Actionable Intelligence” can check on some of these metrics for you and offer reporting to the same end – that your order is being shipped complete, although it’s in 3 different shipments from 3 locations and on 3 ASNs.

For example, it is quite common in the retail world for acceptance of partial shipments. In our Widget order, above, I’m ordering 1500 assorted widgets. But now you are stocked-out and back-ordered for the BLUE widgets I’m requesting. But you’ll have restocked the supply and can ship out the blue widgets in 2 weeks. So you ship my green and red widgets and the blue will come later on in 2 weeks in another shipment. Again, it’s fairly common for this to happen.

But, I’ll have a dilemma with my item management application because it’s looking to match a PO for 1500 widgets against a shipment for – only 700 widgets! “BEEP! BEEP! Warning! Warning! Danger Will Robinson! Danger!” That ASN will fail because it doesn’t match. The irony, of course, is that the 2^nd shipment WILL pass the match, because I should have received the first shipment and the PO is now for an open quantity of 800 units, not 1500 because of receipts!

It’s also quite common for a supplier to mix orders on a single shipment. In the case of the widgets, maybe California ONLY stocks the blue widgets and I’ve got a current order and a back order for blue widgets and it’s being sourced from their California facility – once the shipment arrives from Waikiki or Wai-Chang. So they’re going to ship the previous order (1000 blue widgets) and the current order (800 blue widgets) in a single shipment from California with a single ASN…

Or there’s the case of overseas direct container shipments through the local ports (Long Beach and Los Angeles for my part of the world) and maybe the 1000 unit or the 800 unit widget orders aren’t enough to fill one of those containers alone, but together, they’re a full container! Again, I’m getting one shipment and one ASN for the 2 orders…

But with using products and applications (such as Actionable Intelligence), I can verify that you will, in fact, ship my orders for Widgets and that, in fact, you ARE in compliance with my PO and my orders and you’ve fulfilled the purchase request. And this can be a great boon for me in the long run, because I know that you’re a good vendor and supplying my orders as you can and not missing out on anything.

One of the other benefits of this kind of “content compliance” is that you get some serious visibility into the supply chain and this can allow for better inventory controls and item levels at your stores and distribution centers. If you’ve got a bit sale on blue widgets coming up, and you know that Willy’s Wonderful Widget World can’t provide them, then you know you’re going to have to change your planned sale OR you’re going to have to source your widgets from someplace else – another vendor or supplier.

It also will allow you to have some greater visibility into your vendor’s abilities to meet your needs – now and in the future. If you notice an ongoing problem with Willy’s Widgets on a regular basis, this can give you some leverage into finding another source or beating a new price and/or agreement from Willy, based upon solid data of “we ordered 10,000 in year X and you only had 2000 to ship” and allowing for better negotiations with Willy.

That’s a win-win for Wayne’s Wacky World of Widgets in Walla-Walla, Washington and my wide-world of customers – Wanda, Wong, Wilson, Wendy, and Bill (aka William), who all live to collect Willy’s Wonderful Widgets. By allowing me to fine-tune my supply chain and keep myself in stock of blue widgets (or whichever widget I’m worried about), I can better service my customers and keep better tabs on my supply chain and never have to worry about Wanda walking away to Waldorf’s Widget Emporium on the world wide web to fill her need for widgets.

Content compliance can be tricky – depending on where, when and how you source your information – but by knowing that your needs are being met – through some SaaS solution (as above) or through some other “in-house” or add-on program, you can be content in your content compliance.