What kind of advice would you let the Soccer Mom Company know?

An unusual problem has occurred for this small multinational company: people are getting confused about dates in internal memos, purchase orders, and e-mail. Towson Hopkins handles all IT functions for SoccerMom. When he designed the company鈥檚 database, he was not aware that the format for dates in Canada and Mexico was different from the format used in the United States. For example, in Canada and Mexico, the notation 7/1/07 indicates January 7, 2007, whereas in the United States the same notation indicates July 1, 2007. Although it seems like a small point, the date confusion has resulted in several order cancellations.








Towson has asked for your advice. You could suggest writing a simple program to convert the dates automatically or designing a switchboard command that would allow users to select a date format as data is entered. You realize, however, that SoccerMom might want to do business in other countries in the future. What would be the best course of action? Should SoccerMom adapt to the standard of each country, or should it maintain a single international format? What are the arguments for each option?What kind of advice would you let the Soccer Mom Company know?
Having worked for and with international companies, I am very familiar with this misunderstanding!





The best way to handle this is to keep it as simple as you can:





1. Don't try to ';enforce'; one single global format. You will just upset people from one country or another. Not a good strategy, particularly if you are trying to force a format on a customer!





2. Share the problem with your employees. They will understand. Then, set the standard that employees MUST spell out the month, either in full or in part, when a date is used in all internal email, documents and forms. This also applies to orders taken from customers. For example April or APR, or Apr is OK, but never 4. Then, regardless of how someone writes the date based on their personal preference, their customer, or local custom, the meaning will always be clear.





3. There are other ways to do it, but if I were to advise IT, I would recommend that they adopt the Excel spreadsheet approach to store a date as a number, but ONLY allow the date to be displayed with formats such as April 11, 2009 11-Apr-09, which are explicit. Of course offer the equivalent names and abbreviations for all of the languages that your business needs to support.





I believe that these actions should address the concern.