Customer Guidelines

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to describe the implementation of Customer EDI at The Hershey Company. This document will be updated as Hershey develops new EDI capabilities. For further information, email the Technical contact for EDI/EC Customers.

The Advanced Ship Notice transaction is exchanged between the organization responsible for detailing and communicating the contents of a shipment, or shipments, to one or more receivers of the transaction. The receiver of this transaction set can be any organization having an interest in the contents of a shipment or information about the contents of a shipment. The transaction set can be used to list the contents of a shipment of goods as well as additional information relating to the shipment, such as order information, product description, physical characteristics, type of packaging, marking, carrier information and configuration of goods within the transportation equipment. The transaction set enables the sender to describe the contents and configuration of a shipment in various levels of detail.

The Invoice transaction is sent by Hershey Foods to the customer relative to the billing for goods shipped to the customer. The Invoice Process flow illustrates the exchange of documents between the customer and Hershey.

The Message transactions are sent to Hershey Foods for the purpose of messages, explanations, and other one-time communications. The 824 is used to provide the ability to report the results of an application system’s data content edits of transaction sets (ex: EDI invoice rejected by partner’s application system, as opposed to acceptance/rejection of EDI standard compliance via the FA). It was designed to accommodate the business need of reporting the acceptance, rejection or acceptance with change of any transaction set. The intent of the 864 is to provide electronic communication for people, not for computer processing, in some human-readable form.

The Payment Order/Remittance Advice transaction can be used to make a payment, send a remittance advice, or make a payment and send a remittance advice. The Payment/Remittance Advice Flow illustrates the exchange of documents between our customers, their financial institutions, and Hershey’s bank.

The Purchase Order transactions (850 and 875) are used by our customers to communicate the placement of orders for Hershey products. The Purchase Order Change transactions (860 and 876) are used by our customers to communicate the request for a change to a previously submitted purchase order. Changes are accomplished by restating the value of the data elements to be changed rather than indicating the difference between the old and new value.

Vendor Managed Inventory (852, 855)

Two transaction sets are used for Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI). The Product Activity Data transaction (852) is used by our trading partners to advise Hershey of inventory, sales and other product activity information. This product activity data enables Hershey to plan and ship or propose inventory replenishment quantities for our trading partners via the Purchase Order Acknowledgment transaction (855), which serves as notification of a vendor generated order.