Dealing with abends - S0C7

I have recently been part of a project. Thank God that it is now implemented and being used by our clients. I have encountered a data exception error (abend code = S0C7) during the pilot implementation. It took me and my teammates 2 hours to correct this error. Because of this experience I should be careful next time not to move alphabetic character or spaces to a data field that is declared numeric for it will cause a data exception error or S0C7.