Evergreen Acquisitions

The week before last I posted about the problem with the ? in titles causing the electronic orders to fail.  Well, that's not the only punctuation problem! 

We've learned, due to another EDI failure this week, that these characters/punctuation will also cause failure:
                                  (plus sign)
                                   :  (colon)
                                   ' (apostrophe)
 Preceeding these characters with a ? will release the character and restore the meaning, for example the title 2 2 would be entered 2? 2; a title with a colon would be entered ?:, a title with question mark would be entered ??.

Rather than worry about coding your title field this way, just ignore these characters when creating your records; simply skip over them. 

Don't worry about titles that you have already entered in your selection lists.  Mary will edit out these offending characters before she creates the purchase order.  But do start ignoring them when entering new titles.

Everyone is doing a great job entering order records and preparing them for ordering. The  process has been working well.  We are doing frequent small orders which seems to be the best for both the ordering/receiving functions as well as invoicing. 

The EDI ordering with Ingram is  working smoothly for the most part.
There are a few occasional glitches that cause the order to fail or individual line items to be cancelled. 

Equinox says they are learning a lot from us!  Here is what we've learned so far:

1. If there are any spaces preceeding or after the ISBN the ISBN field will not send properly and Ingram will cancel the line item. 

The title can still be ordered, we order it via iPage (we add a note in the note field of the line item that it was ordered @ iPage & the date). but it does add a couple of steps to our process.  It has happened on a few occasions that most and in one case all line items in a purchase order have been cancelled because of a space in the ISBN fields. 

So, we would ask that when you are entering the ISBN that you make sure that you are at the beginning of the field when you start typing the ISBN.  Do not hit the space bar when you have finished entering the ISBN,  just click on Save record.

2.  If there is a quesiton mark in a title, the entire Purchase Order will fail to send via EDI.  Evidently in the software coding, the character ? means something other than a question mark so the entire process will stop. 

Titles that have question marks should be entered without the ?.  The title will display incorrectly for only a short time as when the full Marc record is loaded, it will have the correct punctuation.  This is likely a temporary problem and will hopefully be fixed in a future release.

Equinox was able to fix the overlay function so that when we upload the Marc records  most are now properly overlaying the order bibs.  That's progress!

Our EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) testing is complete and we have successfully placed several orders from Ingram via EDI!  All Ingram orders will now be automatically submitted electronically via EDI.

It's a very cool, efficient process and we are very pleased with ourselves!!
Each Ingram account has a separate EDI account set-up in Evergreen.
When Mary activates a Ingram purchase order, it is sent via ftp to the Ingram server.  There is a built in delay before the order is transmitted to Ingram.  Ingram then transmits a confimation report with the status of each line item: confirmed, backordered or cancelled.

For backordered items, we are adding a note in the line item stating that it's backordered and the date.  If a title you have ordered hasn't arrived, check the notes field to see if it's on backorder.

A couple of titles have been cancelled via EDI but are in fact available at Ingram and have been ordered via iPage.  Those titles will also have a note in the line item stating that they were cancelled via EDI but ordered on iPage and the date.  I'm investigating this issue with Ingram EDI support.  

While this was a bear to implement and the testing was rocky, it is a big advancement for us and is one of the benefits of open source.  Innovative's electronic ordering module was way out of our price range.