XchangeIT has written to newsagents who have consistently failed their timeliness, quality and or other criteria for sending magazine sales data from their businesses. This action was first forecast over a year ago with regular reminders published since.
A flaw has been discovered in the timeliness criteria which XchangeIT has agreed to review. This is where a newsagent may run their end of shift process prior to the end of the day, for sound operational reasons, and have some trading on that date before closing the business for the day.
Colleagues at my newsagency software company Tower Systems are navigating this gap in how XchangeIT expects newsagents to operate their businesses versus how some newsagents do operate their businesses. The gap means that some newsagents who do send data recording all sales are set to be penalised because sales data for a day could be split across two sales files.
Immediately on being informed of the situation XchangeIT agreed to investigate.
In the meantime, I urge newsagents to treat the issue seriously and review their EDI related processes to avoid the XchangeIT penalty.
Footnote: if only magazine distributors would accept penalties for consistently poor performance as they are now imposing on newsagents through their XchangeIT operation. The fines would cripple them. Double standards are on show here.
I phoned xchangit and was told my data was fine and the email was pretty tuff. What I can’t understand is what they do with this data because its not used to provide realistic supplies.
ACCC will fix this, if they still have some teeth left
We received the same generic spam.
It said we were not compliant – yes we are.
It said they had contacted us – no they have not.
We sent them an email with an attachment showing we were compliant. We received the normal auto reply – we will get back to you – NO they haven’t.
We pay to give way sales data – but does it help allocations – ????
I don’t towersystems provides service like exchangeIT?
Mark – if only the main distributors would actually use the sales data we pay to provide to them to provide fair and consistent sales driven supply/replenishmentfor ALL titles, instead of just the few that they choose to use it for!! (Whoops – sorry for that comment – I must have been dreaming)!!