Re: Conv to BPCS

>  From:    JoDoDu@aol.com
>  
>  Our company is about to begin a conversion from our existing package to 
BPCS 
>  6.1.  Is there a guide to writing conversion programs available that will 
>  enumerate file/field dependancies, consequences of selecting various field 
>  values, etc?

Check BPCS archives for BPCS Documentation like Manuals from 3rd parties such 
as David Slicker's cross-reference of dependencies.  Are you going it alone 
or using consultant help?  Our consultant came armed with a bunch of 
documents that they had developed for past BPCS clients & evolved over time. 

You will probably need several of the BPCS manuals since there is a need to 
both understand the interaction & then delve into the details.  SSA & 
multiple 3rd parties offer classroom training in BPCS, which makes a lot of 
sense for getting a crash course in understanding how it all functions & 
having someone to ask questions since some of the manuals are clear as mud 
regarding cross-indexing ... this manual has some of the info I need but 
where do I find the rest of it? 

If you are coming to the AS/400 or HP or whatever from another platform, you 
will probably need at least a month worth of classes in the new platform so 
you can work productively with the new versions of programming languages.  If 
you are using some conversion tools to help with the process, you will also 
need to learn how to use them properly.

There are charts in SSA documentation (not easy to extract & correlate) that 
are like a flow chart of what sequence to implement applications & their 
files ... certain files contain various codes & settings that have to be 
defined in other files first, so there is a proscribed sequence of 
prerequisites.

OS/400 externally defined files are really nice, compared to some other 
platforms, but sometimes the summary descriptions are a bit misleading 
compared to what is in the source (info gets chopped off).

Are you confident you have time between now and Dec 31 to get the software 
figured out, written & tested?  I think this is a bit close to the Y2K 
deadline to be starting such a project team.  You might be better off with 
remediation work on your existing package, assuming it is on a compliant 
platform.  There are automated tools to subtract 28 years from your current 
data (which works on midrange computers but not on PCs) so that internally 
none of the programs need to be altered, but between the program & the user, 
28 years is added to the dates they see.  You can also send your data to a 
vendor that does the 28 year subtraction, so that they will do all the work 
for you & it can be done in a matter of a week or so.

Our conversion from BPCS/36 to BPCS 405 CD took 7 months & I thought it went 
pretty fast thanks to consultant involvement, and the fact we were going from 
one version of BPCS to another version of BPCS ... 15 years ago our 
conversion from home brew to MAPICS I took over 5 years without any 
consultant involvement, so 10 years ago we converted MAPICS I to BPCS/36 with 
SSA help & it took almost a year.  Successful Conversions between 
manufacturing systems typically take 12 to 18 months unless you have a lot of 
help from good consultants.  Unsuccessful Conversions can leave you hanging 
with nothing to show for an awful lot of work.

Al Macintyre
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