The world’s leading glassware company created a joint venture with a leading cookware manufacturer and began adding the new subsidiary’s products into their existing Apprise ERP system. Since joining together last year, the customer has been slowly moving the subsidiary’s products into their existing EDI channels and finding problems.

DCS’ role was to blend both companies Gentran:Server EDI systems through the existing maps. This required changes because of product classification; one currently sells in UPCs, while the other is in EANs. UPC was the first common product 12 digit barcode, while EANs are the 13 digit “European version.”

The customer’s first Trading Partner to send Purchase Orders (850) for both entities was Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Challenge

The BBB’s accounting department wanted glassware and cookware orders reporting separately, requiring DCS to make the 850 map output an identifying code for the subsidiary. This worked well until Bed, Bath and Beyond orders started coming in with a mixture of UPC and EANs in the same order.

Talks with Bed, Bath and Beyond ruled out creating a different Vendor ID so the two entities had to be unique leaving the creative differences up to the mapping.

Solutions

The decision was made to create two orders whenever there was a blending of UPC/EANs in an 850. One company’s P.O. number would have “-A” appended to it, while the other had “-B.”

  • The Ship Notice/Manifest (856) map was changed to strip off the “-A” and/or “-B” from the reported P.O. number.
  • The Invoice (810) was the other challenge. A P.O. that had products for both entities had to create one 810 even after being split into two orders. The 810 map was re-designed to have any invoice with a hyphenated 850 suffix err out for manual intervention.

Results

DCS designed and delivered “How To” documentation for continued success with both 850s and 810s. The customer can now keep track of all items as distinct orders, even when item blending occurs within an order. They now shipping without changing any processes, the ASNs meet Bed, Bath and Beyond’s criteria. Blended order invoices have stopped getting out accidentally and the process for changing the file has been documented. DCS was able to address and solve all of the customer’s problems in a timely fashion.