Chevron Canada Resources & EDI/EFT

Chevron is one of many oil patch companies which uses EDI as their main tool for transferring invoices, service orders, and other financial forms between itself and it's competitors, distributors and retailers.

Chevron currently uses EDI for 2 major Financial Areas

Joint venture projects between chevron and it's competitors, which involves something called Joint Interest Billing where chevron is able to bill it's competitors for products and services rendered on Joint Venture projects and vice versa.

Chevron has many field offices which need to purchase supplies and products. Chevron has set up a agreement where they are electronically billed for these products. This requires little to no financial representatives in these field offices.

If Chevron and one of it's distributors or competitors decide to form a EDI partnership the following should be agreed upon usually in a binding contract, this usually is done through some form of committee with representatives from all interested companies.

Exactly what types of data need be transmitted from one company to the other. This usually is very specific, specifying length of fields, and the order in which they should be sorted.

Choose one of the EDI data standards which will satisfy all of the data requirements agreed upon.

Decide of they are going to use POINT to Point communication, or if a VAN would be more appropriate

If a van is to be used the parties must agree upon how payment for services of the LAN will be divided.

The must also decide who is responsible if the VAN fails in some way. E.g. Hard drive crashes or information is not being received by the mailboxes

Once a agreement has been reached the parties will apply for a EDI address form carriers such as Dun's and Brad Street. an EDI address is much like a IP address.

Process Chevron follow in transmitting and receiving information using EDI

If Chevron wishes to send a invoice or purchase order to a distributor or competitor it will do the following:

Use a translator like EDI transit to convert the information from it's initial format, usually a mainframe document. into the predefined standard format which was agreed upon by the trading agreement. The format of the EDI standard is discussed later.

Asynchronously modem the EDI formatted document to GE's EXPRESS Service, and the information sent is then placed into the mailboxes of the company that he invoice was directed too.

If Chevron receives documents from the VAN it will download the EDI formatted document from their mailbox the use EDI transit to convert the document from the EDI standard format to the format of their mainframe document.

How EDI Express distributes the standard data to the proper mailboxes

When the VAN receives the EDI standard document which usually contains

-Header which has the address of all the mailboxes the information should be placed

- Data

- Trailer which separates EDI documents

The VAN will read the header, decipher the mailboxes to place the information, creates something called envelopes for every company.

Security: Each company gives other companies rights to place only certain documents into their mailbox

The VAN also generates reports for chevron giving them information about documents sent and documents received.

Since the VAN manages the transportation of data, and the EDI address are not specific to any one VAN, this means that trading partners don't have to be using the same VAN. Although the VAN usually encourage trading partners to use the same VAN.