I recently created an Amazon Freight account since they opened up to non-Amazon business. Holy crap it is expensive! I'm getting quotes from CA to OH at $12,000 for an FTL from Amazon, but less than $6,000 live-truck rates. If I switch to delivering to an Amazon facility a couple miles away, it brings it down to $11,000.
I'm an operations guy mainly, but I do a lot of business analytics and such as well but by no means an expert. We're a DTC company and send all our data through a middleware solution; you could say it 'flows through the Pipe' nearly a dozen and a half times (without saying the middleware name). I can only export 50,000 lines at a time, but if I do, it takes nearly 2-hours. If I need to download multiple months of data, I need to make multiple requests which then slows it down even more - nearly 6hr for the third file to download.
When I asked support there why it took so long, I got the reply:
>Timing can vary, depending on how many lines are being exported and how much data is on each line. Again, this is quite standard even with companies like Shopify(it was a huge issue for similar merchants while I worked there). The real issue though, is creating multiple export requests one after another - this causes a queue and to avoid throttling the API that creates the call, timing is reduced down. In a way, its better for it to be slower, then not send at all.
To clarify one point: submitting multiple smaller requests won’t speed things up overall. In most cases, it can actually slow things down further because each request enters the same processing queue.
What can help in the short term is breaking the report into smaller segments (for example, splitting by date range or dataset). Smaller exports tend to process faster individually, so you can start working with partial data sooner while additional exports are running.
That, to me, is BS. They tell me to submit smaller requests, but then say it won't speed things up. So then I need to combine a dozen files into one instead of three...not helpful if I am trying to analyze a full quarter.
I need to make business decisions, I need to answer questions from my executive leadership team, I need to know what's going on in near-real time. Why would it take 6hrs for reports to download? A previous vendor we used prior to implementing this system worked with DOMO and I could download 120,000 lines in minutes. It's all csv files.
We're looking at going to Korea next summer and can't search that far out, but I see I can transfer my Chase points to Air France/KLM and get +20% bonus. We would book flights out of the US, but understand we can purchase AF/KLM tickets for this and fly on Delta.
I'm concerned that we wouldn't see awards travel for the dates we end up going, so asking for advice. It'd be an extra 71,000 miles, so could be worth it?