When I first started in this industry I expressed surprise by the “loose” parameters of 852 POS documents at an EDI conference. I was told the standard is like our language. Yes we speak English, yet “pop” is soda in certain parts and “tennis shoes” are sneakers to some. Further, because there is so much unstructured data in the POS document – especially when it is door level, it is harder still adhere to a standard. It is much easier when there are set fields like those in a PO or invoice.
One of these variables is the presence (or not) of Sales dollars. Why are they missing on so many retailers’ EDI?
There are many theories. A popular one revolves around margin guarantees. Vendors in certain verticals, such as apparel, must offer the retailer a guaranteed margin. If the retailers promotes heavier and deeper and the margins fall below an agreed to percentage, the vendor must cut a check to the retailer for the difference. Yes you read that correctly. Urban legend has it that sales dollars used to be on certain retailers earlier EDI documents. When that data was analyzed by the supplier and the payment amount was contested, retailer management instructed their EDI team to remove the dollars. I even spoke to one person at a very large and well-known apparel company who claims it was he that contested that payment at one of those retailers.
Still that does not account for other retailers such as Toys R Us – margin guarantees are much less prevalent in the toy industry. Other retailers who promote heavily such as Macy’s, Kohl’s and JCPenney do include dollars. Nordstrom’s offers dollars on their web portal (by style) but not in their EDI as does Target (Company Level on Partners On Line) and Sears (Company Level on Business Exchange). So what other reasons might there be?
Our VP of Customer Support, who has extensive EDI background, surmises that this may be a relic of the past when these documents were sent by low baud modems. Are you old enough to remember those days? You may not need to be: I have run across companies that are still set up that way. A single POS document at door level could take hours – if not days - to transmit! So decisions may have been made to exclude data that was considered less essential – such as dollars. Everyone knew the retail price in the days prior to the times of heavy promotions. Perhaps the specs at those retailers have not changed since then.
So what to do about that? We have – at clients requests – come up with ways to fill that information back in. We do caution clients not to do that as it is a risky exercise. Who decides what the dollars should be and that accurate? Also that information must be provided each week. That diminishes the beautifully automated flow of data processing.
What do you think? What have you heard? How do you manage this omission? Please let us know.
The theme of this month is international Trade, Admittedly our knowledge centers on the US. We understand many retailers abroad are smaller and more oriented to the independent model here in the States – no POS data. That said we also understand there can be POS data available in certain instances. Is there a standard? Does it match the US standard? Please let us know,
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