Error Handling – your way

Link instantly notifies you if an error occurs, so that you can resolve any kind of problem before they affect your business.

When you have a lot of trading partners and document transactions, some of your transactions will require manual handling.

Transactions can fail for many different reasons. Perhaps there is an item number missing in an order. Maybe the recipient changed the password on their FTP server. Just to mention a few examples.

Link's advanced error management detects errors immediately and sends a notification to the right person. This is important because valuable time is often lost when an error has to be reassigned to the right person.

For example, when an invoice is failing due to a missing item number. In many companies, the EDI Support will receive an error notification and then they have to reassign the notification to a co-worker in accounting – why not notify that person right away? This way the error will be resolved much faster and your EDI team save valuable time.

Typical errors

Different errors can occur when you exchange EDI-documents with many partners, for example:

  • Missing data in documents
  • Data structure is not as agreed
  • The FTP passwords have been changed
  • The AS2 certificate expired, etc.

Link lets you define how errors should be corrected for every single type of document you exchange.

Notification errors – your way

In Link, the recipients of error notifications are called stakeholders. A stakeholder is the person – or group of persons – who is responsible for handling the error. 

It is completely up to you to decide who will be stakeholder for which type of error. It can be people in your business who are in contact with the customers and suppliers that you exchange EDI with. It can also be your EDI team who want to be notified whenever mapping errors occur. Or perhaps someone from the IT department who is interested in network errors and other technical issues.

In any case, you can make sure that the responsibility is placed correctly, so that the error is handled and the correct transactions are secured.

Choose how you want to be notified

Link lets you receive error notifications by email or text.

The message could contain:

  • a description of the error.
  • a link containing information about all aspects concerning the failed transaction.
  • a suggested solution to correct the error.

Be notified of non-events as well

On top of being notified of errors, you can also choose to be notified of transactions that should have happened, but did not for some reason. These are often referred to as “non-events”. In Link we call them alerts.

For example:

”We know that we are to receive more than 1.000 waybills from a specific customer before 11 AM on all working days.”

Link will send you a notification if this does not happen.

At first, the alert can be sent to your customer, giving them a chance to correct the error or cancel the alert if the costumer made an intentional alteration. If the customer does not react to this notification within a certain time frame, Link will notify the appropriate person in your organization.

Monitoring: A complete overview

Besides error management for individual transactions, Link also has a monitor that gives you the complete overview of all the parts that make up your EDI flow: servers, network, disks, databases, etc.

Having a monitor in the EDI Support that displays the “traffic lights” from the Link monitoring service, enables you to stay ahead of potential problems and provide much better EDI support for both your co-workers and trading partners.