Default Deliver Disaster
When setting up a supply chain integration, there is a lot of information that is exchanged. One thing that should be explored is what the supplier will do if they can’t process the order. This should be explored by making a list of all the errors that you can conceive of. This is the beginning of your test plan. Then having the Vendor respond with what they will do. (this doesn’t have to be actual transfer of erroring files, it can just be filing out a form with what will happen when said error is sent. But of course, actually sending bad files to and from your test systems is a good idea when possible.) In the end you will have an idea of what will happen and what to expect when something goes wrong. However, sometimes this doesn’t cover all the bases.
When Defaults Attack
Once upon a time there was a supply chain consultant. (ok, so this was me.) And this supply chain consultant setup and integration between a vendor and a service provider. This hosted integration worked really well for years. Then suddenly we received a delivery at the location of the supply chain consulting office.
Needless to say that our office was not setup to receive the large pallet of materials that were being ordered.
Yes you guessed it. It was an order that had been processed from the service provider but sent to our location as the Ship To destination. Well, we returned it and began a remediation process to find out why our address had been used instead of the correct customer. In the mean time, the Vendor wanted to charge restocking fees. The Provider wanted their product. And we just wanted to figure out what was going wrong.
Second Order
While we were in these conversations, a second order showed up. Yep, to our office. Now we had everyone’s attention. We walked the order through the process and finally found the error. Default shipping location in the Vendors system was listing us, the supply chain consultant, as the default location.
The service provider had added a facility to their office. But it had the same shipping location as the parent organization. So when they were adding this with the Vendor, they indicated to use the Default Shipping Location. They assumed that this would be the corporate office. The Vendor didn’t know this was a problem. But during the initial setup we didn’t have all of the shipping info, and we used our in the test environment. Once the went live everything worked great. No one realized that the vendor had retained our test shipping location.
Resolution
Well, being that we, the supply chain consultants figured out what was wrong, confidence resumed in the integration. The Vendor removed us from their shipping information, and the Service Provider began to get their shipments for the new facility. You would think that everyone would be happy.
But there were some shipping and restocking fees that were now on the books. What a mess. I think that we eventually spit up these fees and we had to pay a portion of them to clear the books.
Lesson
Find out what happens when things go wrong, before it happens. Because it will happen.
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