Re: BPCS cleanup vs. 24 hour access desirability

>From Al Macintyre 405 CD mixed mode

Fortunately we have no weekend or 3rd shift activity that needs access to 
BPCS while 2nd shift & MIS can work around each other.  We have found it 
convenient to go restricted to do the daily backups & monthly fiscal, but 
there are cleanup functions that need to be dedicated access ... MRP regens 
are not on that list ... they merely cause some sluggishness in concurrent 
access.

Why do you need 24 hour access?  Are you doing internet access directly to 
your raw BPCS data base in which new customer input is going directly to BPCS 
transactions without any intermediate personnel or transaction lag tolerated?

Do you have all corporate departments working 24 hours like 3rd shift 
accounting, or is your company in all 24 time zones trying to run all nations 
in the same environment ... if you can separate geographical areas into 
different AS/400 boxes and/or BPCS environments, you can stagger the 
dedicated stuff into the lowest demand time periods of each greography.

If your requirement is that normal BPCS access is neccessary 24 hours 7 days 
with no scheduled clean up, like at 3 am Sundays, and multiple platforms or 
environments are not acceptable, then you may be asking for the impossible on 
current BPCS offerings.  But, if a narrow window of disruption is acceptable, 
then we can work on squeezing the size of that window.

We do not run cleanups nightly, but once a week, staggering which nites get 
which clean-ups.

How often do you re-IPL your AS/400?

You will probably need to inventory BPCS functions that absolutely positively 
need to be dedicated access, then talk with SSA & IBM to see hardware 
requirements to circumvent the fact that they are not fast jobs to complete 
... example have more than one IBM box and/or BPCS environment in which the 
second one does some processing then replaces the live data & the end users 
are kicked off only long enough to make the switches.

IBM backup has an arrangement in which if you can kick everyone off for the 
same five minutes, it flags current reality of files, then you let everyone 
back on while the backup is copying the reality as of that 5 minute time 
period, but the backup might not actually get completed until several hours 
later ... you need a goodly excess Hard Disk to support this notion.

I am thinking that theoretically some SSA functions might be able to do the 
same kind of thing combined with their simulation models & you really only 
need to go dedicated for however long it takes to recopy results of the file 
crunching back to the live environment.

I think the cost of this is such that for true 24 hour 7 day week 366 day 
year, you need to move to some other ERP than BPCS, which is not really 
designed for that reality.

>  From:    rhamberg@mother-parkers.com
>  
>       We are an AS/400 shop running BPCS 6.00.02 mixed mode. Our business is
>  growing and we will soon be running 24hr/day 7 days/week. I  would be 
> interested
>  knowing how other shops deal with Jobs which require dedicated system 
time. 
> ie
>  DRP/MRP. Any ideas will be appreciated.
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