Austin Cutlery & Tool Catches EDI Errors Before They Become Chargebacks with SPS MAX

The Challenge

Kevin Langford is the Operations Project Manager at Austin Cutlery & Tool, and EDI landed in his lap a couple of years ago almost by accident. When the company shifted to SAP S/4HANA in 2024, integrating its highest-volume trading partners was a vital part of that project, and Langford has managed EDI since. Today the company has around 30 trading partners, most of them concentrated on the dropship side, with a lean customer experience team fielding every order, acknowledgment, and exception.

That volume runs into a specific bottleneck on Austin Cutlery & Tool’s dropship business where, for some large customers, the purchase order acknowledgment precedes the shipment confirmation and invoice. Austin Cutlery & Tool’s systems don’t enforce that sequence on their own: the ERP sends the purchase order acknowledgement after verifying inventory, while a separate track sends the pick task straight to the warehouse. If the purchase order acknowledgment fails silently on the customer side, nothing downstream slows down to notice: the warehouse still picks, packs, and ships on schedule. By the time the team starts its day, the order has often already shipped, and fixing the documents after the fact is exactly what triggers costly chargebacks: the retailer sees a shipment confirmation and invoice that never had a valid acknowledgment behind them.

The Solution

Austin Cutlery & Tool runs its order-to-invoice cycle for wholesale and dropship retail accounts through SPS Fulfillment, connected directly to SAP S/4HANA. Purchase orders arrive and are acknowledged automatically; shipment confirmations and invoices are generated as warehouse tasks close, without a person keying data between systems. That automation is what let Austin Cutlery & Tool grow from a single direct EDI connection before 2024 to close to 30 trading partners without adding an EDI specialist to the team.

When something does go wrong, Austin Cutlery & Tool works the fix through an internal out-of-control action plan (OCAP), a manufacturing-world tool the team borrowed to structure how it resolves EDI failures. MAX, the intelligence built into the SPS network, surfaces context grounded in real trading-partner behavior and catches issues inside the workflows customers already use. MAX gives the team one place to catch problems early and decide what to do about them.

Rather than reacting to a single failed document, the team uses MAX to get ahead of purchase order acknowledgment, ship notice, and invoice errors: understanding why they happened in the first place and spotting the trend before it repeats.

“We see MAX as an opportunity to get ahead of our EDI document errors, understand why these errors occurred, and identify trends.”
— Kevin Langford, Operations Project Manager, Austin Cutlery & Tool

MAX now answers questions Langford and his team ask directly, grounded in how a specific retailer’s rules actually play out. The team’s Warehouse Manager uses MAX to troubleshoot advance ship notice questions and write process documentation for a number of wholesale retailers’ requirements, work that used to depend entirely on what he remembered from experience. MAX also helps Langford identify the written rules, giving the team a documented reference instead of relying on one person’s memory of how a specific retailer wants things done.

“We see MAX as an extension of the continuous improvement mindset that we want to implement across all our processes.”
— Kevin Langford, Operations Project Manager, Austin Cutlery & Tool

The Results

MAX flags acknowledgment failures ahead of the shipment and invoice automation, giving the team a chance to intervene before a missed acknowledgment locks in a chargeback-triggering shipment.

Before this alert, the team relied on a standard error email to find out something had gone wrong. Langford said MAX gave them far more visibility than that.

“MAX allowed us to identify a PO acknowledgment failure with a high-profile customer. Our Customer Experience Manager thought that notification was fantastic. Even without that specific alert, MAX was more detailed and serves as a place where we can identify and monitor trends related to PO acknowledgment failures.”
— Kevin Langford, Operations Project Manager, Austin Cutlery & Tool

Timing matters as much as the alert itself. The warehouse runs pick lists three times a day starting at 6 a.m., so an order that fails its acknowledgment overnight can already be picked, packed, and shipped before anyone on the team logs in. An alert landing between 5 and 6 a.m. Central leaves a real window to catch the failure before that morning’s first pick run, rather than discovering it after the shipment and invoice have already gone out.

When the team catches a missed acknowledgment before the shipment confirmation and invoice try to post, they avoid a chargeback tied to that mismatch.

“If we catch it in time and we’re able to get that purchase order acknowledgment before the advance ship notice goes out, we reduce the opportunity for a chargeback.”
— Kevin Langford, Operations Project Manager, Austin Cutlery & Tool

Lessons Learned

Austin Cutlery & Tool’s experience scaling from one direct EDI connection to nearly 30 trading partners offers a few takeaways for teams facing similar growth without adding headcount:

1. Document the error playbook before you scale. Austin Cutlery & Tool built an internal “OCAP” (out-of-control action plan) for EDI failures so the fix doesn’t live in one person’s head. Do that before trading partner count grows past what one specialist can track.
2. Let a shared tool carry the institutional memory. Retailer-specific quirks, like how a specific account wants an ASN filled out, used to be tribal knowledge. Giving the wider team a place to look it up frees the one person who used to field every question.
3. Watch for trends, not just individual errors. A single failed acknowledgment is a fire to put out. A pattern of them with the same trading partner is a signal to fix the mapping or the process, not just the order.

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