Re: BPCS migration

I think I talked about this in some other BPCS_L thread but the last week has
been so intense I forget where.  We had to give up on using the standard SSA
conversion tools for several reasons, such as:

We were coming all the way from BPCS/36 & were neophytes in the OS/400 world,
so there are these long CL strings to transcribe & what does this all MEAN &
there is risk of el typo & we are struggling to understand BPCS environments.
We are drowning in documentation, and apparently some of it is obsolete or
superceded, but not really indexed which is good & which to bypass.  Basically
the SSA standard conversion process is not what we would call user-friendly.
There's a bunch of educational pre-requisites that are not clearly spelled
out.

There are these menus with many steps, some of them have bugs, however since
we were there, there has been some new version of the standard conversion
which may have fixed some of the bugs - so take a bunch of options, then run
bunch of fixes, then verify Ok, then back & forth & we wanted a conversion
that could run from start to finish unattended, once we had perfected all the
steps.

We were going from FOUR data bases to ONE environment with FOUR facilities -
some files needed thrown together into an aggregate of records & some needed a
single master with totals from the four before & there were other variants ---
SSA standard tools had no provision for this sort of thing.

We used a third party conversion tool called FILE TRACK from Outlook Computing
http://www.outlookcomputing.com - It was  D Y N A M I T E -- the vast majority
of it did not need a technical person to be doing the work.  We have a non-
BPCS application still on S/36 that needs to come over to OS/400 & I will be
using File Track for it also.

>            Dear BPCS User,
>  
>            We want to convert our BPCS database with the standard tool
>  from SSA. We have a lot of problems. Can you transmit your experience
>  rather your solutions ?
>  
>            Michael Rapp
>            Schlueter-Systems GmbH
>            eMail:    michael_rapp@schlueter.de
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