At the risk of showing my technical ignorance, I must ask the following
question ! I've asked around my company but haven't got a real good
reading yet.
First some background. I have about 1,200 trading partners setup through
VANs and private dials to OEMs. We process about 140,000 transactions per
month. We are also growing (slowly) our connections with suppliers. I
want to open up other ways to send/receive EDI transactions (ANSI,EDIFACT)
using the Internet instead of VANs for those partners that want to
participate in such a path. I also want to be prepared to accept data
from other sources such as XML. All of these inputs will go, by various
translation methods, into my legacy EDI system which I use to distribute
transactions to my business units using an internal standard format.
My question is in two parts:
First, what is the general range of administration cost to support
partners sending data to an Internet server ? I'm not asking about the
cost of servers, firewalls, etc. Assume for this question that these
already exist and are paid for by the department that owns our website.
My question is specifically about how many people it takes so support the
setup and maintenance of the actual partner connections and movement of
data into backend legacy systems.
Second, If I start telling our partners that we can accept data over an
Internet IP connection, what types of problems can I expect to see - none,
some, alot... It sounds so simple, there just has to be a technical catch
somewhere, right ?
Things that pop into my head are:
What if our server is down ?
Do we use FTP ? If so, what if the partner has a different flavor and
we can't connect ?
What kind of problems have people seen when moving away from the
mothership (VANS) such as resolution of the age ol' problem of " I sent
you a transaction on ... no you didn't ...."
Are there security setups that need to be done with every new partner
that wants to send or is it a one time setup of the server ?
I ask these questions because I need to evaluate whether it is cost
beneficial to have an third party host a site that all partners connect to
or it is easier and cheaper to just let everyone drop data onto a server
connected to our website (with all the proper security bells and whistles
included). I don't know the costs on these hosted sites yet, but they
claim to give you the same capabilities as the VANs for store-and-forward
functions and also claim to shield the hub company from all the plethora of
different types of connections by providing one IP pipe into the hub. The
idea sounds good in some ways. I know I'll need to get data from the ANX,
Internet and probably other sources soon. It also looks like these hosted
sites can gather data from VANs so I can have one pipe into my legacy EDI
system instead of the various dials I have now.
Any opinions and information is greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Rich Nering
EDI System Manager
Parker Hannifin Corporation, Cleveland, Ohio
=======================================================================
To signoff the EDI-L list, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
To subscribe, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
To contact the list owner: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Archives at www.deja.com in bit.listserv.edi-L newsgroup. Use powersearch.
