[JohnWright]

Hello, my name is John Wright and I recently have been hired on and have taken over reporting responsibilities within GC3. I am very new to this program and received a little training before the person I replaced left. I have some questions regarding some problems, but I did not know under what category to place this inquiry. I would like some elaboration on the purpose of 214 messages and their function. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

[gig]

Hi John,

I presume you are asking about the 214 Transportation Carrier Shipment Status Message (an EDI transaction)

This message is usually sent by a transport carrier to provide a shipper or any involved party the status of the shipment. There are usually 8 pieces of data that are critical in using this message:
1. Carrier PRO # or Carrier Reference Number
2. Carrier SCAC (Standard Carrier Alph Code)
3. Shipper Reference Number
4. Status Code
5. Reason Code
6. Status Date/Time
7. Location (Usually City/State/Country)
8. Timezone (usually set to local time of the event, for domestic carriers)

One variation is swapping the Status and Reason Code for Appointment Codes. You also can include a lot more data. My eight pieces are the min you would want.

By receiving this information you are able to track the status of your shipment within OTM and not having to go to the carrier's web site. You also can do some event management and reporting around this. It allows you to track carrier on-time pickup and deliveries. Also, very useful for generating inbound planning for receiving DCs.

Overall this is pretty good document to receive at least once a day from as many carriers as possible. OTM has a pretty simple XML structure that allows you to import. You main concern is insuring you can match keys up (your GID in OTM with the data from the carrier). Integration Saved Queries come in handy here.

Good luck and let me know if you need anymore information.

John

[JohnWright]

Thanks John for the report, very helpful. Now I do have a question. I prepare a report for how many messages to shipments we receive every week. In Dec, the messages dropped every week up to Jan 1. Now when I do the report, shipments are being received but there are no messages received at all. Could there possibly be a disconnect somewhere that is not allowing us to receive the messages? We are currently using GC3 4.5.

[gig]

Hi John,

I might need a little more information on this to be helpful.

Let me first see if I understand the problem correctly.
1. You execute a report that conveys the number of status applied to shipments. (Is this an average per shipment or do you list each shipment and show the number of status messages?
2. Since Dec 1, the number of messages per shipment has gone down. Not to be insulting, but you are looking at new shipments right? Once a shipment is delivered you rarely get another status message associated with it. If it is an average then let's continue.
3. If I understand now no new 214s are being applied to your new shipments, correct?

First place to look is in the Transimission Manager. Look to see if you are receiving ShipmentUpdates, and see if they are erroring out. Post the error if you are getting any.

Second place, check with you EDI group if you have one and see if message are flowing through on their side.

Finally check with the carriers and see if they are sending them.

Do you know how Status messages are posted to OTM? That might help.

[JohnWright]

John, there are no 214 messages being received when I used the transmission manager. The IT team found that we are receiving the information, it's just not getting pushed into OTM. Thanks for your assistance!

[gig]

Hi John,

Good luck, just send another post if you need anything else.

Thanks,
John

[rj5316]

Hi Gig,

would be glad if you could send some / any informatiopn / doc that you might have on the use of EDI mssgs in OTM.... are these translated to XML for use in OTM and in case these are being sent from OTM are the XML convereted to EDI.....

any help on the use of EDI on OTM wud be of great help...

Thanks

Rgds--

[gig]

Give me a bit to find some stuff.

Thanks,
John