A Data Communication Solutions (DCS) customer in late November was happily surprised to receive about 25,000 orders daily from Walmart.com. This seasonal spike exceeded normal volume by a factor of 10. Unfortunately, the spike caused processing problems. The fear was that even a 1% failure meant hand keying 250 orders daily (each with a different ship-to home address).
Overview
The orders arrived though an IBM Gentran:Server for Windows EDI system. Every five minutes, the orders that arrived in the last five minutes would be processed and loaded into the Sales Order Management module. When operating at this high level, the processing time took longer than the elapsed time between triggers (the 25,000 orders did not arrive evenly over a 24 hour period, but peaked between 4:30 PM Eastern and 10:00 PM Pacific).
Our DCS EDI Specialist was called to make emergency changes to the system. The first step was the analysis, which revealed a set of problems such as no system time to auto-archive orders. A constraint was that the Shipment Notices could not be deferred (25,000 more documents).
Solution
Our DCS EDI Specialist created three solutions to address the spike in orders.
1) The incoming order file was split so that it would be small enough to process in less than a minute and to set the processing schedule at every 90 seconds.
2) Processing was suspended every 1.5 hours to permit auto-archiving.
3) Invoices (another 25,000 documents) were set to process at 2:00 AM Pacific after all Shipment Notices were sent.
In summary, the crisis occurred without warning so a new EDI system could not be implemented. Yet, the good news is that management wants more than 25,000 orders daily for the upcoming holiday season and is willing to invest prudently.
Are you experiencing increase volume? Need to review your EDI system and processes? Need emergency changes to your system? Our DCS EDI Specialists can fine-tune your EDI. Contact DCS for your free assessment and let us help you determine what improvements you can implement now to help your EDI processes run smoother!
