Looking Up and Converting Coded Values

In Chapter 10 we talked about looking up UPC numbers used in purchase orders from customers and converting them to the item numbers used in our own systems. This is just one example of a common problem. Chapter 9 hinted at another potential problem in the discussion of the X12 purchase order example. A common practice in retail and grocery orders is to send an identifier, such as a DUNS number with a four-digit location suffix, as a ship to location rather than sending the full name and physical address. It is common for EDI management systems to allow users to define their own lookup and cross-reference tables for such purposes. However, the situation might be easier for users to deal with if lookup and cross-reference features were included in their business applications. I have seen such features in high-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems but have not seen them frequently in lower-end systems.