Sean Hoppe Consulting Group

Best Practice to Determine of ship-to Address Book Number:

The JD Edwards Address Book system maintains information about companies and people with whom you do business. The Address Book contains company names, contact names, addresses, phone numbers, notes, and other pertinent information

We examine the best practice to determine the ship-to address book number, for inbound EDI transactions. Vice-versa, we examine the best practice determine the customer’s location ID by deriving it from the JDE ship-to address book number. By using the best practice we are able to leverage existing the JDE Address Book system. We find that re-creating an existing As most of us know, in the JDE tables, the address book number is commonly referred to as the SHAN value.

Why to use Best Practice to Determine Ship-to Address Book Number

Using the best practice for the address book number determination is important from the start of any E1 implementation.

Reason 1: By not using this best practice, IT will find itself owning this process all while it is a process that is owned by business units such as customer service. Business Units (ie Customer service) need to be on-board from the get-go.
Reason 2: The address book number is the precursor for other lookups and needs to be done correctly. By using the best practice for inbound EDI documents, we can ensure that the additional lookups that need to occur such as the sold-to number, branch plant, and possibly the customer item cross reference can occur error free

Alternate to using Best Practice 1: Some alternative solutions store an internal crosswalk table that is manually maintained by the IT group, not by the business unit that owns the data. This practice places the onus on IT groups to maintain customer data.
Alternate to using Best Practice 2: Others might use the ABALKY in address book table.  This can be quite cumbersome due to the limitations of the ABALKY table. This field transcends all customers and while at the same time needs to be unique for each trading partner. Being that ABALKY is 20 characters in length JDE customers that are using this method today will find limited options especially when it comes to storing DUNS #s.

What is the Best Practice to Determine Ship-to Address Book Number?:

The JDE best practice to determine the ship-to address book number is utilizing JDE’s F0111 table. This table is commonly referred to as the Who’s Who table. By leveraging the Who’s who table we are able to tie each JDE address book number to a unique customer location ID accross the board. By using fields such as TYC (type code), REM1 (Remark Field), and ALPH (Alpha Name) we can use a common theme across all EDI customers.

Benefits to Best Practice:

The Best Practice to Determine of ship-to Address Book can streamline all inbound/outbound EDI processes that involve the address book ship-to number. For inbound we can ensure the correct address book number is used and allow for secondary and tertiary look-ups to occur error free. For outbound, this JDE best practice can limit the number of errors that can occur due to not having the trading partner’s location ID set-up correctly. Most of all this best practice transcends all EDI trading partners and is supported by multiple business units of an organization

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