An AS/400 BACS transmission module. A specialist suite of communications software which extracts payment data from your financial applications and transmits it directly to the UK clearing system. Designed in June 2003 and approved in January 2004 it is the latest and probably final transmission product to use direct asynchronous connection to BACS. If you are using Type 10+ access to BACS from the AS/400 then this is simply the best package you will ever get.
There's no doubt about it — the modern trend is for PC-based communications to BACS. Their new BACSTEL-IP specification has been designed for the PC idiom and embraces leading-edge web technologies. The weak point in using PC software to transmit your AS/400 data is just that — a magnificent and complex PC application, with primitive mapping to AS/400 data bolted on as an afterthought. Eventually it may be possible to get the whole process contained on the AS/400 itself; until that time asynchronous access remains a simple, proven and very reliable approach. Clearway 10 has been designed from the ground up to be the ultimate ‘legacy’ solution.
Future development will use our intelligent application interface as the starting point for an IP solution. We may have to use PC hardware (and one of several available third-party packages) as a bridge for the final leg to BACS, but your data starts on the AS/400, and AS/400 software needs to drive the whole process. Data acquisition and control are the key design criteria - our existing software will monitor, capture, and take total responsibility for all your transactions. You will not accidently duplicate a payment run using this smart front-end — whatever protocol is subsequently used to actually transmit the data.
Call it an expert system if you like. Two huge programs take charge of the entire process. The first is your entry-point to the application. Signing on as a BACS superuser, it will configure itself, validate the communications, monitor and capture payments from multiple applications, and present them for transmission. The second program takes over from this point, managing the communications environment in its totality. Session recovery is fully automatic — we're so confident we provide no manual recovery routines. It's not that things can't go wrong. It's just that we've written the application to sort out transmission recovery itself. It knows where it's up to, and when errors occur, it automatically checks the submission with BACS, instigating data transmission from the point of failure.
The transmission module passed its official package test with BACS on January 14 2004. First time, and in a record 19 minutes and 29 seconds. The tests are basically designed to demonstrate all required functionality and exercise recovery facilities by deliberately engineering a line break. This time speaks for itself. A combination of thorough specification and old-fashioned industrial robustness allowed the module to sail through its paces.
Not a common requirement, but very useful if you are handling a lot of BACS user numbers. The module can be operated in three modes: to accommodate a Bureau number and multi-file submission, to process multiple user numbers if you have no Bureau number, or the more-usual single-file single-user environment. Data can be from any financial application that formats a BACS ‘Standard 18’ file, ie both multi-processing day and single processing day payment files. Such files can also be single or multiple-member. If further customisation is required, it will be provided free-of-charge as part of the commissioning process. We really do intend to capture any AS/400 data, and make a good job of it!
Modems are easy enough to handle if you know what you are doing. We support all IBM modems, past and present, external or internal. Configuration scripts are included to master the 7855, 7857, 7858, 7852, 2761 and 2771. Also the Multi-Tech MultiModem II if you have one of those. We would recommend the latter modem, as it is both cheap and available, can be supplied by us at short notice and works nicely with this package. But we're always keen to extend our repertoire and meet a new modem.