Re: Stock Allocation (modify INV500)

Bill wrote:

> great many BPCS users on this list who do absolutely no programming 
> at all and might not even have programming staff on site, 
> so the thought of having to make a change to a program IS a big deal.

Although we do have "programming staff" on site (one person = me, struggling 
without AS/Set or a decent test environment) we are also inundated by 
advertising from 3rd party places that specialize in BPCS modifications & 
there are also a lot of BPCS consultants on this list ... so if you were to 
say, for example, that you are definitely interested in some outfit doing 
this modification for you & to contact you off line BPCS_L with some idea of 
cost & their interest in accepting your business, I dare say that you will 
get a dozen to a score of different contacts offer to do the job for you at a 
rate of $100.00 to $300.00 per hour & that it should take no more than 2-3 
days.  You can also pay SSA to do a custom job for you.

Claudia wrote

> I completly agree with Bill.
>  
>  Each new release you will receive in the future, you have to waste 
>  YOUR time again doing the same changes to another source program.-

Obviously this is something you need to discuss with whoever does your 
programming changes - how to cope when SSA sends BMRs, to fix some other 
problem, that upgrade the software that you had modified.  This is why we 
leave the original SSA intact & have our own variants whenever possible in a 
library independent of the SSA structure, except added logicals & message 
file members, so we can turn off & on most of our modifications at will.  It 
also helps when calling Help Line to have the mods turned off so they are not 
part of a problem we are asking for BMRs to fix.

Thanks to PDM-54 we are now able to determine if it is less trouble to apply 
our mods to their latest code, which we can see because we left the original 
code intact, or SSA's latest BMR changes applied to our modification ... but 
you are right, it is extremely time consuming to compare BMR list to our 
mods, and figure out where there are conflicts & what we are going to do 
about them.

We did modify a lot of stuff that was lost in the last release - such as 
rephrasing literals - that I have not yet created a work-around to re-apply.  
It would be nice if I had source for message members so that PDM-54 could 
list the differences.

>  I always expect that SSA makes those changes.

How long can your corporate needs afford to wait? ... 1 year, 10 years, 
forever
Does SSA know about the changes you are expecting them to make?
We have in the past periodically taken a list of our hottest needs to our SSA 
account representative asking for an ETA on any of them being delivered, only 
to learn that some had been available for some time without us being told, 
because we were expected to see them on OSG.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©

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