Kevin:
Hello there! I am not sure if you remember, we sat and talked to each with
the Boise Cascade people during lunch last Monday at the Boise EC
Conference.
Regardless of what VANS, ISPs, service providers and others proclaim
(verbally or otherwise), in practice they operate in the following manner
(at least the ones that I used, like Advantis, AT&T, GEIS, Harbinger, etc.):
1. Notifications are normally made for scheduled down-times/disruptions.
For instance, when nodes or central facilities are scheduled to be upgraded
to the next version of hardware or software, activating or de-activating
FEPS or banks of modems, telco migration, facility expansion or relocation,
etc.).
2. For day-to-day down-times/disruptions (in other words, un-scheduled), if
they are localized and depending on the seriousness of the situation, the
VANs/service providers may or may not notify anybody. Over the years, we
encountered some who will notify their biggest accounts, but not the smaller
ones; some don't notify anybody at all; etc. Who does what and when is
probably best communicated between you and the providers, or you can email
me privately.
3. Service levels are also functions of the following: region of the
country you are at; what shift (7AM-3PM, 3PM-11PM, 11PM-7AM, etc.) of people
is supporting you at the time of the network outage or disruption;
operational mergers situation when one VAN takes over the operations of
another; etc.
>From an operational contingency perspective, it is best to view every box
and every component between your system, to the telco company, to the
VAN/service provider, all the way to your trading partners and back as a
potential point of failure or disruption. From this view, one can then,
review, analyze and assess which component fails more than others, and if
vendors are involved and uptime being that important, take a position in
developing "realistic" options to reduce failures and disruptions (network
or non-network related), which may translate to changing VANs/service
providers or telco companies. Anything less than this is a prescription to
trouble.
Have a nice day! Sorry I had to leave early last Monday.
Thanks,
David Paraiso
http://www.edi-info-center.com
This is not to say, that we all should be striving for a higher level of
service
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, June 23, 2000 8:05 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: More VAN Conspiracies
>
> Harbinger...hummm
>
> When I am late paying my VAN invoices, Harbinger's staff is amazingly
> efficient at notifying me and following up. When their VAN "pipe" was
> down
> unexpectedly on Monday they failed to notified us. When my team
> investigated and realized that the VAN service was down, I was astounded
> to
> learn that Harbinger does not have a "service failure" notification
> process.
> Harbinger's statement was, "We have 45,000 clients, you can't expect us to
> notify everyone when our service is down". Hummmm...I guess a solution
> would be to reduce the number of VAN clients to a manageable level....
>
> I would invite other VAN representatives to share via email (no calls
> please) how they would notify their clients in the event of a "service
> failure".
>
> I would hope that a public discussion of these issues would encourage
> traditional EDI and VAN companies to "get with the program" and recognize
> that there are alternatives these days. Therefore, they must compete for
> our business by demonstrating true "value-added".
>
> 0============================0
> | Kevin Benedict
> | B2B E-Commerce Manager
> | micronpc.com
> | 208-893-1738
> | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> | "The Process is the Product"
>
> 0============================0
>
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