Re: BPCS Emailing and Barcode Capabilities -- BPCS-L

This is more of an AS/400 topic than a BPCS topic.

E-mailing and BarCodes should be in two separate threads.

The AS/400 can print bar codes if you get the hardware and software to do the printing and/or input, such as a 3rd party package that speaks to BPCS.

Thus, your shipping dept can generate bar code labels off of that which has been picked for shipping, with the right info on the items involved, in the format desired by the particular customers, and your receiving can generate bar codes to identify raw materials as they come in the door, and your fork lift truck can have a bar code reader that talks to the AS/400 via wifi to generate INV500 transactions for whatever it moved, and when it comes time to do physical inventory, you can get the job done in 1% of the time it takes a factory whose inventory is not internally bar coded.

Internal turn around paperwork, such as production labor tickets, can be generated with bar codes used when reporting the labor, so that the volume of data entry by humans is reduced significantly over that which is needed when all that info has to be entered manually, that is ALREADY on the ticket, such as order #, operation #.

Our company is not yet doing this. We have looked at several vendors that make BPCS-friendly interfaces to this bar code reality.

Software can be added that will copy any AS/400 report from spool to any traditionally PC application, such as e-mail, spread sheet, graph. Typically a person has to take a menu option to designate THAT report goes where, or use GUI to "drag" that report from desktop directory of AS/400 reports into whatever other PC application you want it.

or the company pays some $$ to get something that makes it more user-friendly than native Client Access ... there are literally hundreds of options out there to do so.

So for example, we have an outside sales person who needs to get reports showing our activity with the customers he services. He is 1,000 miles away or more, most of the time. We run whatever reports he needs. We point and click at these reports one at a time. We paste them in a desk top folder of similar reports. We adjust name to designate what it is and date we ran it. We alter the font to one that is proportional, such as Courier New.

Depending on the nature of the data, we put it into a simple TEXT file, or import into a new spread sheet, which may be a copy of the last time, with new data.

We send him an e-mail with the reports in attachment.

We are too cheap to buy PDF.

A few months ago, the Evansville area AS/400 user meeting (STAR BASE) had a meeting on tips and techniques in which about 15 of us stood up and gave some kind of presentation ... mine was on cool stuff you can do with *OUTFILEs ... another fellow did a presentation on spreadsheets/400.

Now where all of OUR spreadsheets previously had been some BPCS report to spreadsheet as indicated above, he was talking about someone in Client Server opening a spread sheet on desk top in which the data there was instantaneously the latest data/400. I followed up with him and asked for more info. He sent me an article on the subject in PDF.

I can dig this up and forward to you.
Please people, do not send a bunch of me toos to this list.
Write me off-line if you want a copy.

Basically, the article was explaining how to use Microsoft Macros to embed SQL/400 inside Excel on Client Access, so that when someone opens the Spreadsheet, the SQL runs to re-populate the data with the latest story, just like running some BPCS inquiry program on Green Screen or Client Access. It has been a while since I looked at the article, it is probably copyrighted, plus I am not an Excel Guru ... someone else would need to extract from it what is appropriate to place on Wiki/400.

I followed up the sharing of this PDF with my Excel Guru co-workers, with SQL for beginners primer, to show them how to get at simple SQL SELECT statements such as what have we shipped to customer X in the last 7 days, or what's on order to send customer X in the next 14 days, and other examples of what I thought might be typical needs, using a variety of different BPCS files to help prime the pump. I was planning on putting that stuff into Wiki/400 eventually, but it probably be a few weeks before I get there. This primer is far too long to become a BPCS_L post.

There have also been presentations at our AS/400 user group on such topics as using WebSphere and e_BPCS products so that YOUR customers can use the Internet to sign on to YOUR BPCS data base and run programs like ORD300 SAL300 in which for customers what they see is a bit different than what in-house employees see. For example, Customer X does not get to see what we are doing for Customer Y, and Vendor A does not get to see what we are ordering from Vendor B.

Actually, I think what businesses need in the way of order acknowledgements is not for customers to send us a mountain of data for our customer service people to transcribe laboriously into ORD500 then send print-out back to customer for their people to tediously verify that we keyed it right. Rather, what is needed in the 21st century is for the customer to send us a report, or spread sheet, or PDF or whatever floats their boat, and when we get it, our customer service personnel take like a menu option and all that customer order data goes into BPCS the same way as if a human had spent several hours on ORD500.

Incidentally our AS/400 user group had a presentation on FOXTROT that showed exactly that. Of course, your company policy might not be to accept customer orders verbatim ... what if they ordering something past due when you get it, or lead time violation, or price not what you can afford.

Then after the data has gone into BPCS, there needs to be a report, in the same format as it came from the customer, so that what we have in BPCS can be compared to the customer input, not by some human tediously eyeballing it, but programmatically, like PDM-54 except the output a bit more meaningful to the non-technical person.

Has anyone been able to upgrade their BPCS configuration to allow order confirmations to be emailed directly to the customer or POs directly to the vendor? Also, has anyone been able upgrade their configuration to print barcodes?

We like BPCS and want to keep it but it's not meeting our needs. Thanks for your help!


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Al Macintyre  http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac
BPCS/400 Computer Janitor ... see
http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html