Well, it's not silly, but....
A few years ago I was working at a manufacturer of components for the "big
three" (it was actually six, but who's counting?) automobile manufacturers.
Of course, prompt, accurate ASNs (ANSI 856) were required; the automobile
manufacturers kept score of "Vendor ASN performance" with deductions for
ASN not received on time, inaccurate counts, missing or wrong PO number,
etc.
Well, this component manufacturer worked very hard for one of these firms,
with one of the plants working and dispatching trucks 24 x 7. ASN's were
generated and transmitted within ten minutes of the truck leaving the yard.
One Saturday night/Sunday morning the manufacturer had a truckful of parts
leave the yard at 1:25 AM, to arrive at the automaker's plant Sunday morning
at 8:00 AM. The ASN was sent - five minutes later - with all the correct
information, including the date and time the truck left the yard.
Imagine my client's surprise when the automobile firm rejected the ASN
because the ASN was transmitted prior to the shipment actually leaving! But
how could this be?
You see, the Saturday night/Sunday morning on which the shipment occurred
was the weekend in the fall when we change back to standard time from
Daylight Savings Time. When the ASN was sent at 1:30 AM Central Daylight
Time, the way the auto manufacturer in the Eastern Time Zone read it was to
add one hour to the ship time to convert to local time - so they read the
ship time as 2:25 AM local. But at 2:00 AM in the Eastern time zone, the
clocks had been set back, so it was only 1:30 AM when the ASN was received:
the ASN had "clearly" been sent 55 minutes before the truck had left, was
therefore rejected, and a 'black mark' added to the vendor's ASN performance
record.
It turns out there was a legitimate bug in my client's ASN software:
Although the operator entered the "shipment time" manually, the software was
set up to select the DTM04 "Time Code" - "CD" (Central Daylight) or "CS"
(Central Standard) - from the current system time zone, which was not
changed until 6:00 AM Sunday morning when the system operator arrived.
Gee, if only we'd been on XML-based ASNs back then .....
Michael C. Mattias
Tal Systems
Racine WI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
PS: To their credit, on appeal the automobile manufacturer removed the
'black mark' from the vendor's record. I don't want to say who it was,
because I don't want the the new owner (Daimler AG), to think of Americans
as ''softies.'
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