Re: Poor Response Times ... BPCS INV

Several different ideas here with respect to improving BPCS performance.

We are in BPCS 405 CD with a 1.1 million record ITH file thanks to 365 day
retention.  INV300 with F21 history has great response time for us ... we
have never had a problem, although I can see that it is not instantaneous.

Ideally everything should be subsecond response for the people ... ie. so
fast that they push the enter key & do not even notice that there was a time
lag of the computer doing something with the data to get the next screen.

You might ask your people if it seems to them that particular actions seem
slow, like particular programs steps, or if the overall system seems
sluggish, then see what else is running concurrently with this ... WRKACTJOB
& for God sake do not sit on the F5 key.  Query/400 joining large files, such
as ITH + CMF, run interactively, has been known to bog down a system big time.

Check out DISPLAY BPCS ACTIVITY shareware available from
http://www.precosis.com.au/piu1.htm

which is also included in the REMOTE management shareware
http://www.precosis.com.au/rv1.htm

If you recently have had an OS/400 upgrade, you might make sure you have the
latest PTFs from IBM for data base SQL performance ... IBM does have some
PTFs that were developed specific to SSA BPCS performance.

If you recently had an AS/400 box upgrade, that is another related topic.
We had very poor performance from our last box replacement, which was cured
by getting a faster processor & more memory.

SYS800 controls the retention of how many days to keep ITH history, and also
several other files.  This is something you need to periodically review with
all departments of your company since different people have different needs
for how far back to keep this information.  For example, if you have shop
orders on line LONGER than inventory history & labor history, this will
sabotage your ability to close those shop orders.

Be sure to run INV900 at month end and at no other time.  It does a lot of
stuff, including recalculating beginning balance for the month.  Check the
archives ... we have had past threads on what all should be run at year end /
month end / fit this in with physical inventory check list / reorganizations
do what & how often.

Reorganizing BPCS files ... we do this approximately weekly, sometimes more
often.  SYS menu / 23 / 12 with no one else on BPCS while it is running ...
INV900 is also that rule.  There's a bunch other options on SYS / 23 that we
do approximately weekly in a particular sequence ... we created our own SYSC
menu with the options in the sequence we do them ... there's a sub-group I
run more often when we have a lot of minuses in the MRP etc.

I have found several BPCS jobs that run significantly faster (e.g. CST900
goes from 5-6 hours to 1 hour or less ... Mon nite it ran in 15 minutes but
our total # shop orders down because physical inventory imminent) in the
aftermath of SYS120 which takes 1/2 hour to run, so it is no brainer to run
that if it is going to save aggregate of many many hours of many jobs.  It
might be smart to run this on eve of end month.

How often do you do a total IPL ?  We try to do this about once a month,
shortly before end month & in fact have done one 3 times this week due to
backup tape drive dying & various efforts to recover it before total
replacement.  IPL does not do as much for AS/400 performance nowadays than in
years past, but it does help, particularly if you have a heavily loaded
system.

Also check the archives on midrange dot com for MIDRANGE-L ... there was
recently a thread on logicals.  It used to be that excess logicals on AS/400
was a bad thing from a disk space & performance perspective, but today what
with OS/400 improvements in SQL dynamic access to the best logical for the
scenario at hand, if you have a particular access path that is used heavily &
no logical optimized for that, then you need to create such an entity.

Archives for this BPCS_L at http://archive.midrange.com/bpcs-l/index.htm
Archives for MIDRANGE_L at http://archive.midrange.com
or go to http://www.midrange.com & select archives

> From: dweaver1@mmm.com
>
>  We use BPCS V6.0.04 & have a large 'ITH' file (1.4 million records).
>  Response times for the 'Material Status Enquiry' (INV300) using 'F21'
>  (history) have always been poor, but in the last few days typical response
>  times have become awful.
>  To try & reduce the size of 'ITH' I am trying to run 'Inventory Month End'
>  (INV903) & archive records to 'YTH'.
>  Does the 'Lot Trace Enquiry' (API300) still work ?
>


MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
BPCS 405 CD Manager / Programmer @ Global Wire Technologies Incorporated
http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com = new name same quality wire
engineering company: fax # 812-424-6838

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