Record Acceptance Process

The SOTS Record Acceptance Process is used by the Supplier to screen and then accept or reject data records associated with outage events sent by a Customer. This element of the SOTS process focuses on the syntax checking of SOTS data records, such as proper date formats, proper field types (numeric versus text), allowable values from a SOTS-specified list, etc. The process allows for records to be rejected and a reject notification sent to the Customer. Records should not be stored in a supplier database until the record passes the acceptance process.

While the SOTS Record Acceptance Process is modeled on the screening of a single record, it should be noted that the SOTS data record is actually a collection of data records, and a given SOTS data record could have multiple outage events, and each event must go through the acceptance process.

Past experience has shown that during initial implementation of the SOTS process and during the first few months, many discrepancies will be discovered with the outage event data records being processed. This is typical and since this process can and should be highly automated, corrections can be made in the underlying automation, and in the long term, the number of rejects should decline to near zero.