Another approach would be just a simple blanket letter stating your
company's terms and conditions from your purchasing department to all of
your suppliers. These purchasing T&C's could cover all types of POs: verbal,
faxed, EDI, mailed, or carrier pidgeon. There's nothing magic about these
T&C's having to be attached to each PO....what does your purchasing dept do
today for verbal telephone orders? Your purchasing T&C's should be
independent of how you place the order. EDI is not magic and doesn't require
a different set of purchasing T&C's. On the other hand, you do have a
trading partner EDI implementation manual, don't you, in which you identify
all of your transaction implementation specifications, your processing
requirements and approach, key identifiers, communications mode(s), key
contacts, who pays for what if VAN charges come in to play, etc.
Your legal department should assist you in this effort. I worked for a
company for 22 years in which we routeinly on a daily basis received
electronic PO's from customers and not once were T&C's part of that
electronic PO, whether the electronic PO was in a proprietary file format or
after standard X12 EDI was implemented. We also never used TPA's, since
invariably getting your trading partner to sign such a document took an act
of god, got lost in the legal department, and only made work for the
lawyers, and in fact, became the roadblock to actually establishing the
electronic information exchange.
Rachel
Could some of you from the list comment or point me to information on "Best
Practices" for communicating Terms & Conditions for EDI purchase orders? We
have had a request from Merchandising executives that the Terms & Conditions
be
sent with every EDI PO. My understanding is that this documentation should
be
an addendum to the trading partner agreement, but since we are having so
much
trouble getting partners to sign TPAs, it seems to have become an issue.
I'm sure this may have been discussed at some earlier date, so if someone
could
address how to access the archives, that would be welcome as well.
I'd appreciate any information you could share.
Pat Knabe
EDI Project Leader
Blockbuster, Inc.
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