I can’t stress Leah’s point enough on being a captive. Make sure you get intellectual property rights on anything your outsourcer develops for your company and ensure in writing that you can part ways without spending a ton of money to start from scratch. I’ve heard recently from a major outsourcer that they will give maps away, but, you want to make sure if and when you take your ball and go home , you like the software you’re going to be using. E.G. GXS you’re probably using AI, Inovis – TLE or BizManager, Sterling – GIS. (I’m not sure or implying which would give you maps or sell them or blow you a raspberry)
Also, there are some outsourcers/service providers will run your software for you. ;-) Regards, Darrell _________________________________________________________ Darrell Hughes / Capgemini America / Kansas City Applications Management / Outsourcing Services - EDI Phone: 816-347-7842 / Fax: 816-347-7504 / www.capgemini.com<http://www.capgemini.com> Email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> / IM: EDIFYI 777 NW Blue Parkway Lees Summit, MO 64086 [cid:[email protected]]Together. Free your energies _________________________________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Leah Halpin Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 11:21 AM To: Emmanuel Hadzipetros; Christine Evola; [email protected] Subject: Re: [EDI-L] In house vs. hosted EDI providers Inovis was a good provider of this type of service, not sure I'd be willing to bet they'll stay that way after the buyout. If you're managing in house now, I'd say that you will most likely save money by continuing that practice, as long as you pick an efficient and cost effective EDI tool. When you lose control (service bureau), you become captive to your vendor and costs can escalate, leaving you with few options but to pay up, they know moving is painful and time consuming (and this applies to all service bureaus). If you do go the service bureau route, be absolutely sure that you have in writing and clearly defined, service level agreements that are acceptable to YOU. As for software, Sterling is good (not sure what will happen now) but expensive, TLE or TLw also good and less expensive (but again, that pesky buyout). Seems like it's all the rage these days. I've been taking a look at the Softshare demos and you can, too, by going to their website, seeing for yourself is always better than believing a sales guy, IMHO. Of course, they were recently bought, too, see yesterday's emails. Since you mention you're converting to SAP one thing to ask all providers, software or bureau, is whether timely and accurate status messages can be sent back to SAP. SAP has the capability of showing you whether your document has been written to the file system, the translation process has been triggered, the translation process was successful or not, whether the communication session was successful or not, whether the FA received was positive or negative. Good luck, Leah ________________________________ From: Emmanuel Hadzipetros <[email protected]<mailto:ehadzipetros%40hotmail.com>> To: Christine Evola <[email protected]<mailto:c.evola%40att.net>>; [email protected]<mailto:EDI-L%40yahoogroups.com> Sent: Thu, August 19, 2010 11:56:37 AM Subject: RE: [EDI-L] In house vs. hosted EDI providers For EDI as a service, there's also CrossGate and their SAP Information Interchange, which SAP has invested in. I haven't used them but a lot of old Seeburger folks are working there, for what that's worth, and one of SAP's founders is an investor so they are tightly integrated with SAP for EDI and other B2B protocols. >From what I understand, all you need to do is configure your IDocs to point to their ports from your SAP system and everything else - trading partner management, translation, routing and communications - is taken care of for you. They also do all your mapping, which is based on work already done for over 40,000 SAP to trading partner pairings in a wide range of industries. My own personal experience is SAP and Sterling Integrator, which works but you need in-house staff and a high level of skill. Then of course you can always hire me to do it for you J. Good luck. Emmanuel Hadzipetros SAP-EDI Consultant Be sure to read my book "Architecting EDI with SAP IDocs", now available at: http://www.sappress.com/product.cfm?account=&product=H3003 Check out my website at: http://sap-idoc2edi-consulting.com/ And my blogs at: http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/sap/ehadzipetros http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/u/252038725 From: [email protected]<mailto:EDI-L%40yahoogroups.com> [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:EDI-L%40yahoogroups.com>] On Behalf Of Christine Evola Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 7:53 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:EDI-L%40yahoogroups.com> Subject: [EDI-L] In house vs. hosted EDI providers Hi, everyone. I typically just lurk on this group occasionally. I have not been active in EDI for about 4 years but I appreciate and enjoy everyone's honest input on all topics here. We have EDI with 15 partners in house via Tibco right now, feeding a custom SQLServer 2005 backend application. Tibco is expensive and hard to maintain and we are converting our ERP to SAP. Although Tibco has SAP adapters, the Director of IT wants to consider other options such as a service group or replacing Tibco with SoftShare. I have calls into sales reps to get more information about their product lines but would also like opinions outside of the SoftShare and Sterling sales groups. We are on a very aggresive timeline for the ERP conversion so I am reaching out for help. The decision needs to happen in a week. (He just asked me to research last night! ARGH!) My questions are: 1 Does anyone have any information about SoftShare? Recommendations/issues? 2 I believe Sterling Commerce provides service bureau-type functions. We send them our document and they make EDI out of it...that sort of thing. Has anyone used Sterling's services and can you give me recommendations or issues? 3 Do you have experience with another provide of EDI services? Preferably one that supports SAP iDocs? Thank you for your help and comments in advance. Chris Businesss Analyst San Jose, CA [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] </PRE><p style="font-family:arial;color:grey" style="font-size:13px">This message contains information that may be privileged or confidential and is the property of the Capgemini Group. It is intended only for the person to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you are not authorized to read, print, retain, copy, disseminate, distribute, or use this message or any part thereof. If you receive this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete all copies of this message.</p><PRE> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ ... 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