GCommerce was recently awarded a U.S. patent for a method to provide an electronic functional acknowledgement of a document exchange even when the trading partner’s system is incapable of producing the acknowledgement. Primary inventor Jason Popillion is the chief technology officer for GCommerce and a member of the leadership team for the Technology Standards Committee of the Auto Care Association.

Electronic document interchange (EDI) depends on acknowledgement of message receipt, or confirmations, between business systems to signal that critical documents such as purchase orders and invoices were received by the other party. These messages, called EDI 997s, cannot always be generated by the trading partner, so they rely on a third party, facilitating the message exchange, to produce and send the 997. While a 997 from a third party technically works, it is not an assurance that the message was received and acknowledged by the actual trading partner. Message failure and errors can still occur with the associated disruption to business processes.

“Other third parties send the buyer an acknowledgement on behalf of the supplier, as an example. This does nothing more than acknowledge that the third party got the document. It serves no real purpose. The GCommerce patent is for technology that prepares and sends the 997 to the supplier so they can truly acknowledge the message and return a 997 to their trading partner,” said Popillion. “This ability to generate a 997 for a trading partner who is otherwise unable to perform this function is unique to GCommerce.”

Popillion was joined as inventor in the patent by Sireesha Suryadevara, senior software engineer for GCommerce, and Michael Hilty and Andrew Kirpalani, both formerly of GCommerce.