Thank you to everyone that responded. I've run some numbers and want to
make sure that I'm not off base here. (I'm getting the sense that VAN
charges are rediculously high.)
In our situation we are acting as a broker linking buyers and suppliers in a
B2B exchange. Order comes in to us via the web and then we create sub
orders from that order and send those subs to the respective supplier
electronically. We are asking for order acks back, ASNs, shipment status
messages and delivery confirmations. We are also looking to have electronic
invoicing and payment transactions.
This having been said, assuming that I have 2 Mfgs in my exchange only, an
order from one of my users result in 2 orders to suppliers. That's a total
of 7 or 8 docs per Mfg (order, order ack, asn, status (assume 1), delivery
conf, invoice, payment) and 14 - 16 total for the user's original single
order. Assuming 1K of data per transaction I'm looking at 14000 - 16000
characters that would need to be sent and received to complete my user's
order.
If I have any success in my exchange my monthly VAN charges could easily be
above 1M. Does this seem out of line with what others are paying. Keep in
mind that my situation is a bit different b/c I am brokering so many
differnt orders.
Thanks.
Tom
If I am dealing with processing Order, Order Ack, ASN, Ship Status, Delivery
Conf, Invoice and Payment documents and paying for both sending and
receiving of data under this scenario a monthly VAN bill of 100K is not
unrealisitcs
On Sat, 10 Jun 2000 13:21:30 +0100, Chris Johnson wrote:
> In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Tom
> Karcher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
> >Could anyone in the group give me a sense for van charges from:
> >
> >IBM, Sterling and GEIS?
> >
> >Do they all charge by the kilocharacter? What are the mailbox charges
> >monthly?
> >
> >What's the average cost of sending a single PO and PO Ack - assume
single
> >ship to and ship from 100 line items in a sinle ISA.
>
> I can only speak from experience of the situation in the UK, which is
> probably not what you want, but may nevertheless be of interest for some
> list members for purposes of comparison.
>
> There are five VANs which are commonly used in the UK. Tradanet (an
> implementation of the EDI Switch technology which is now wholly owned by
> Geis), BT EDI Net (based on McDonnell (spelling?) technology), IBM IE,
> AT&T EasyLink (which has a strong X400 flavour), and Geis EDI Express
> (about which I know very little!).
>
> Discussing costs is complicated by the fact that there are banding
> arrangements; you buy a mailbox for an annual fee which includes a
> certain amount of free traffic. Additional traffic is then charged at a
> rate which depends on the band you bought into. The costing can be
> complex; with charges based on kilo characters, number of envelopes, and
> number of files. There may also be mailbox storage charges.
>
> A further complication is added by the fact that you need not buy
> directly from the VAN, but through a re-seller who will have made his
> own deal with the VAN, and thus will have his own scale of mailbox
> charges, banding, and traffic charges.
>
> For a user who has about 1 Mb of traffic per month the VANs are roughly
> similar, with a cost equivalent to about 15 cents per kilobyte. In view
> of what I said earlier this is very much a ballpark figure.
>
> If you are a higher volume user, say about 3 Mb/month traffic, then IBM
> IE tends to win out with an effective cost of about 5 cents per
> kilobyte. If you are a very low volume user (less than 50 kb/month) then
> BT EDI Net costs about 30 cents per kilobyte. For the same volume IBM IE
> would cost about eight times as much! A very high volume user would
> negotiate his own deal with the VAN.
>
> If cost were the only consideration then BT EDI Net wins out for the
> small user, and IBM IE tends to be the best bet for the rest. If
> functionality is an issue then my estimation (based on writing network
> interfaces) is that IBM IE is the most complex and BT EDI Net the
> simplest. Unfortunately I have never been able to decide if rich
> functionality is a good or a bad thing!
>
> In the UK choice of VAN tends to be made on the basis of the branch you
> are in, rather than cost considerations. Tradanet is very strong in
> Retail, for example. The exception is probably BT EDI Net, which has a
> cross-branch appeal for the very small user because of its low cost for
> this group.
>
> Please bear in mind that all the above is grossly over-simplified, and
> is my personal opinion. If XYZ VAN responds to show that they are
> cheapest / best then I will gratefully steer clients to them.
>
> Regards
> Chris
>
> --
> Chris Johnson tel: +44 (0)20 8 501 1490 (home)
> EDIMatrix Ltd +44 (0)20 8 559 2454 (work)
> +44 (0)20 8 559 2497 (fax)
> http://www.edimatrix.demon.co.uk
_______________________________________________________
Get 100% FREE Internet Access powered by Excite
Visit http://freelane.excite.com/freeisp
=======================================================================
To signoff the EDI-L list, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
To subscribe, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
To contact the list owner: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Archives at http://www.mail-archive.com/edi-l%40listserv.ucop.edu/
