Concept Question about EDI and Error Processing

Question

Hello All,
This is a concept question, I was wondering how others would approach this scenario.
Let's take this scenario. In EDI often the transmission for a purchase order comes in with an invalid material number. Normal error processing is for the EDI team to research the issue (find the correct matnr), edit the idoc and reprocess the Idoc.  I would like to move that type of error processing out of the hands of the EDI folks and into the hands of the business users.
How would they correct the material number? It has to be more intuitive than editing an IDoc, it has to be an easy and intuitive user interface. This process has to also work for many types of EDI transmissions both inbound and outbound.
There would be many ways to handle this: create a report with an editable grid that would change the idoc during input and create the order with the corrections, convert the idoc to xml and use simple transformations, use an xsl report...etc.  You get the point. 
How would you approach this?  Before I start the design I want to make sure I've given all the options due consideration...all options, webdynpro, transformations, regex, you name it...all is available, except there is no XI. 
Personally I'm leaning towards an editable grid and processing buttons that would post the idoc in background...but I do that type of thing all the time and I may be in a rut and neglecting better design options.
Thanks for your input,
Greg

Answer 1

<b>Paul:</b> So it runs the transaction silently in BDC format, until the error occurs, then opens up in dialogue to allow the user to change the invalid material, and then continue on with processing.
This works when the processing function module uses BDC. But even then I think this is possibly nice from user perspective, but a nightmare from auditing perspective. I.e. correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure there's no log indicating that the user changed the material number. Thus for anybody comparing the IDoc contents against the posted document (including change history) there's no trail that shows this change. Of course you can assume that this is what must have happened, but I personally prefer if I can track in the system what happened and have proof for that.
<b>Reddy:</b>
<ol>
<li>it can be run daily basis, which should select all idocs which are in status 51 with message number (..related to wrong material number). report output should inlcude :idoc number-wrong mat no- space for new material to be entered by business against wrong 1. And there should be one button for RUN.</li>
<li>After RUN, the material number should be changed to new 1 in segments and idocs should be reprocessed.</li>
<li>repeat the run until business enter right mat num.</li>
</ol>
Design seems to limited to me (takes care only of one error message). Might work if that's the main pain point and this is the only one the user is dealing with. Otherwise I'd expect pretty soon they start complaining about having to use different tools for the possible errors. I'd keep the report more general, but allow this special form of processing only for a given error message (otherwise it's a normal re-process as triggered for example via BD87).
Also, I assume that when you talk of changing the IDoc you mean that you actually keep an original copy around (like SAP does when you edit an IDoc). Often this is required from an auditing perspective. I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to check the material number <em>before</em> trying to process the IDoc to avoid wasting system resources (but maybe I misunderstood the step).
Anyhow, in theory you could also achieve all of this via workflow. You can add custom columns to the work item overview in the inbox, only issue here is that it doesn't scale well (so issues with larger volumes).