Rate safety trip for ERP integrations

We have created an Ariba, Integration to Dynamics GP using cXML, eConnect and some .NET, through which customers can push purchase orders to Dynamics GP. The orders result SOP sales orders being created in GP. Tight integration with the supply chain partners comes with risks.

What happened?

Today one of those customer’s subcontractors started voided old, never released purchase orders in their SAP SRM module. This caused pipeline integration triggers to erroneously fire, sending a large volume of purchase orders through the integration. The first few of those orders got through to picking and packing and placed with the carriers for collection. Luckily some of the orders raised suspicions and then the age of the documents was noticed, and finally the volume.

In not much time there were sixty orders mixed in with genuine orders –oh no!

Our customer contacted the contractor and the flow stopped, the mess was the cleaned up in GP. It is always good to reflect after events.

On reflecting we have decided to add the following to the integration:

• Flow rate trip to switch off the integration (much like electrical current trip) should an expectedly high rate of transactions go through the integration (with override)
• Warnings inserted into the order notes for orders that have been created from purchase orders that are more than a month old

With these measures in place the impact of today’s events would have been reduced.

Just like an MCB switch on the mains power, an unexpected surge may unintentionally trip the feature, but better than than a customer accidentally send a few gigabytes of xml through an integration and then have that create orders overnight when possibly no one is there to notice next time!