Rachel's mail below made me wonder on how people dealt with the concept of acceptance for other transactions. The EDI Standard have done a fine job in working out most of the aspect for purchasing, but I'm not sure that can be said for all other transaction. For example, lets use a bill of lading, there is no corresponding transaction that allows a carrier to accept it or even counter the offer (sure you could use the 204/990, but that is very limiting). In essence if you forget about the accept/reject/counter aspects of the transaction and more the system implication, how is one insured that the individual on the other end received and processed the transaction appropriately (997 just checking syntax compliance only). Yes, there is the 824 a transaction that I have not seen widely used and even less used for multiple transaction sets for the same trading partner. So here's my question; have others found it difficult to implement EDI in a manner whereby, you need it to act like an API. That being, you'd like your partner to code around a set of determined error conditions your application can return and have there application make the correction and resubmit the EDI transaction set. Currently, we wind up handling most of these errors as exceptions and deal with them in a manual fashion. It is very common for us to have implement several transaction with a partner to fulfill a work-flow process. I'm curious how other might have handled this situation. Thank, John [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Rachel Foerster [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2001 9:24 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Question, my 2 cents, more 2 cents Mike, It seems to me that some folks are confusing an EDI trading partner agreement with purchasing terms and conditions. These are very different animals. Companies can and do exchange business messages electronically but do not exchange purchase orders electronically. Additionally, the absence of a signature does NOT void a purchase order. A purchase order is an offer to buy. Once a supplier acknowledges that PO as it was received they've made an acceptance. If they change the PO in their acknowledge that constitutes a new offer or counter offer. Furthermore, once a supplier ACTS to fulfill or does fulfill the PO that action also constitutes "acceptance" of the offer to buy. Both parties have now entered into a contract which is legally binding. In basic contract law, then, what you have is an "offer to buy" and an "acceptance of the offer". This is contract law 101. It's unwise in my opinion to tie an EDI TPA to a purchasing agreement. These are separate and distinct business activities. Rachel I thought the purpose of the TPA was supplement the existing purchasing agreement to agree that an electronic document is a legal document. The absence of a signature on the electronic document opens the door to non-payment. The signature usually binds the agreement, lack of one might suggest no agreement was made. _____________________________________________________ EDI-Mike Michael Taylor EC Specialist Banctec - Corporate Information Systems (972)982-2815 ======================================================================= To contact the list owner: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives at http://www.mail-archive.com/edi-l%40listserv.ucop.edu/ ======================================================================= To contact the list owner: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives at http://www.mail-archive.com/edi-l%40listserv.ucop.edu/
