Re: mailing names

Donald,

If you have been on these lists for any length of time, you know that there
are rules against mining for who all is participating, but there are ways to
get some info without violating the rules.

1. Look at the BPCS JOBS site.
http://www.bpcsjobs.com or http://www.bpcsjobz.com
You need to do a posting there of what you offering to do or available to do
& see all the companies with listings there specifically looking for BPCS
professionals to help them out.

2. Take a hard look at the rules for the BPCS_L hosted by midrange dot com.
My interpretation, and you should ask the moderator for clarification, is
that people are allowed to do ONE and only ONE post PER MONTH that is of a
vendor advertising or jobs related request.

3. You may need to rephrase your question.  I suspect that what you are
looking for is not a list of all 300,000 companies world wide that are
running on AS/400 or whatever the numbers are, but that proportion of the
20,000 BPCS sites world wide, or whatever the numbers are, that happen to be
running on the AS/400 as opposed to whatever HP platform it is (if HP 3000
that just died), or the NT version, or one of the earlier versions (there
still are some companies running BPCS on 36).

I got the 20,000 figure out of www.MidrangeEnterprise.com before Y2K or SSAX
bankrupsy ... they used to do a comparison of ERP for midsized businesses in
which one statistic was how many places are using this or that solution.  I
suspect the figure is much smaller now.  However, the 20,000 figure was
probably low because it was based on companies still using SSAX tech support,
and a lot of companies have dropped the official support in favor of one of
the 3rd party places.

SSAX Partners that have access to such lists are not going to sell them to
their competition.  But you can advertise in some publication that BPCS sites
subscribe to.

4. Check the BPCS_L archives.
http://archive.midrange.com/bpcs-l/index.htm

Search for posts about BPCS documentation.
There is a lot of it out there, and there are a lot of people hungering for
more.

If you were to concoct some BPCS documentation aid that fills a gap between
the existing BPCS documentation aids from 3rd party vendors & other
enthusiasts, then offer it for free via e-mail or internet download, and
announced it on the BPCS_L, I hazard a guess that 500 different companies
would seek a copy of it from you.

5. There are conventions for BPCS users around the USA ... I'd say 5-6 a
year.  Some are hosted by SSAX or one of the major 3rd party outfits.  Some
are hosted by local BPCS user groups.  You need to get to the one in your
area & see about a booth or advertise in their program or something.

> I am a contractor looking for work with a lot of experences in bpcs software
>  package and I was wondering if there is a way to find out the names and
>  address for companies on the as/400. Any ideas in anyway would be a great
>  help.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)