When an Order is closed, manually by a user or automatically, the close field on the header will show "waiting for acknowledgement from external system" then reverts back, and the history shows "Failed" under the Action column.

When clicking the failed, we get the message: "Maximum number of attempts to send the close/reopen order status of purchase order xxx to the external system have failed. The status of the order has been reverted to its previous status."

This usually takes 10 to 14 hours when checking the history, between the time the user initiates the Close (clicking the close button) and the the time it fails.

When Ariba exports the close status, it will wait for an acknowledgement of success from the ERP (the external system to which the export happen).

In the case the the export event happens successfully, but no success response comes back, then Ariba will retry to send the Close request for the Order for a total of 6 times.

The interval between attempts is approximately 2 hours (it can vary based on when the initial export happened, hence it can take 10 to 14 hours before it fails).

If all the attempts are exhausted and still no success response comes, then the close action will fail, and the close status will revert to the previous one.

Examples of responses that could cause this:

• No Response.
• Malformed response, or any response that Ariba can't understand.

Depending on what caused the ERP to not send the success response, simply retrying the Close or Reopen action might work, if it doesn't, then further investigation from the ERP side will be needed, please refer to the next section, Troubleshooting, for more details about how to proceed.

If you attempt to close/reopen the order again, and it goes into "waiting acknowledgement from external system" on the close status, then permanently fails, then retrieve the following information to start your investigation, note that you will need to engage your middleware & your ERP team for this:

• From the middleware, use the time stamp on the Order's history (steps will follow) to retrieve the Close request from the middleware.
• Please note that you should have a buffer of approximately 2 minutes, to account for any delays that might have occurred.
• Once you locate the Request message, try to locate the Response message for that request.
• If you find the Response message, you should investigate whether it's a correct success message or not (more details will follow).
• If there was no response message, then that's the problem.

All those response should come from the ERP, so to correct them you will need to engage the ERP team.

How to retrieve the timestamp of when the order was closed:

1. Search for the impacted Order, and open it.
2. Click on the History tab.
3. Find the "Close Order status was sent to the external system" entry & the "Failed" entry.
4. Compare the times, to ensure it's the case analyzed here, the difference should be around 10-14 hours, and definitely not in minutes.
5. Note down the timestamp of the "Failed", DD:MM:YYYY HH:MM AM/PM.

A correct success response should contain the following:

• OrderID.
• The Order's UniqueName (usually starts with EP).
• The line item numbers.

Realm configuration can be set to:

• Not send the close status to the ERP.
• Send the close status to the ERP and not wait for acknowledgement.
• Send the close status to the ERP and wait for an acknowledgement (the configuration where this Article applies).

If the time difference between the Close attempt and failure is only a few minutes, you might be encountering a different issue, for more information, refer to 192493

Another possible issue would be: 192157

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