Patricia Markey, of HICOR (USA) Corporation, asks:
Does anyone have a feeling for how many companies use the X12
TA1 interchange level acknowledgment? Who typically uses it
and when? When one is received what does one usually do with it?
Poor, dear Pat. She may as well be asking whether you put the bridle on
before the harness. In this turbo-charged internet e-conomy, we
shouldn't really be worrying about the EDI flotsam of a bygone era, with
its cryptic codes and expensive VANs.
I would no sooner own up to knowing anything about this kind of EDI
stuff than to question dialectic materialism, or to admit belief in the
Immaculate Conception, in Honneker's East Germany. But considering that
FORESIGHT's TradeSite/XML B2B Commerce Server does accommodate legacy
EDI, I figured that I'd be able to find someone around the office who
would know what the heck Pat is talking about. I asked ol' Abe about
the TA1. He sidled up, flashed his toothless grin, and proceeded to tell
me about the old days of EDI.
Abe wasn't able to tell me exactly how many companies use the TA1
Interchange Acknowledgment segment; I was expecting an answer like
"12498, give or take a few." But he did say it wasn't used much. Abe
said the TA1 is packaged within an ISA-IEA to acknowledge to a trading
partner that an interchange was received from him; it says nothing
about the syntactical correctness of the interchange (other than the ISA
and IEA themselves) - merely that it was received. It's not used that
often because the 997 Functional Acknowledgment is usually turned around
quickly enough. Besides, the 997 response obviously implies the
interchange containing the functional group being acknowledged was
received.
Ol' Abe did take issue with Kelly Babcock's comment on the TA1. She
said "the TA1 segment is most commonly used between VANs at the mailbag
level enveloping to help separate the mailbag enveloping from the
interchanges inside the mailbag." Abe thinks she's confusing the TA1
with the ANSI X12 12.56 TA3 mailbag and Interchange Delivery Notice
segment, which is used by VANs to report on the status of interchanges
as they hop from VAN to VAN.
To see how many companies require the TA1 acknowledgment, just look at
their ISA Interchange headers: the TA1 is returned only if the ISA14
(D.E. I13) Acknowledgment Requested indicator is 1. This indicator is
independent of, and has nothing to do with, whether 997s are returned;
use of 997s is usually up to a trading partner agreement or convention.
There are a few odd situations where the TA1 is the mandated form of
interchange acknowledgment, rather than relying on the 997 to deduce
whether an interchange was received.
William J. Kammerer
FORESIGHT Corp.
4950 Blazer Memorial Pkwy.
Dublin, OH USA 43017-3305
(614) 791-1600
Visit FORESIGHT Corp. at http://www.foresightcorp.com/
"Commerce for a New World"
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