Re: Clarify AS/Set? -- BPCS-L

To MacWheel99@aol.com
This is to clarify AS/SET and its uses. I have been using AS/SET for about 8
years  and  although its primary purpose was to generate BPCS code I can
tell you that any decent RPG programmer can learn to use this tool
successfully in 8 weeks.  It will take them six months to do 'tricky' stuff.
It can be used to modify existing BPCS code and we have on a few occasions
done that.  And yes it is nearly a night mare to read SSA's bpcs code - but
once you learn how the programs are structured it doesn't take too long to
figure out what to change.  We also use it exclusively as our custom
programming tool.  It has lots of great features including change control
and programmer level locking.  Any reports etc and we have seen the
complaints about BPCS reporting are simple as can be if you know which BPCS
files to look at.     We have implemented BPCS 6.02 full c/s at 5 divisions
in less than one year - with three programmers  and one of them was learning
AS/SET.  We could not have done this with RPG .

We also use Robot Scheduler, Console, Alert and Autotuner.  We do not have a
night operator and we run over 146 program on Monday nights alone
flawlessly. If you want to know more about how to really use them together -
go out to Helpsystems web page and read the article from Country Fresh.
www.helpsystems.com    Thats me doing most of the talking.  I guess if I had
to choose between AS/SET and Robot  I'ld just quit.  We have a very small
MIS staff here at CFI  and little time  to go back and do things over.

Anyway - I 'ld go back to mangement if I were you and try again.  The cost
can be justified especially when you consider what consultants and night
operators  and having to rerun jobs due to data entry errors cost.

Wendy H. DeCair
Country Fresh Inc
Software Application Mgr..


If i had to choose my tools of choice
-----Original Message-----
From: MacWheel99@aol.com <MacWheel99@aol.com>
To: BPCS Users Mailing List <BPCS-L@midrange.com>
Date: Friday, February 12, 1999 4:17 PM
Subject: Clarify AS/Set?


>My understanding is that SSA uses this CASE tool to generate BPCS code and
>programmers who are skilled in its use are more productive by an order of
>magnitude of perhaps 100 times, than equally talented programmers working
with
>RPG CL DDS UIM & an alphabet soup of the other specialized pieces.
>
>I put it on my wish list to management, along with ROBOT & TAATOOLS and
enough
>hard disk for commitment control.  I did not get any of that ... if I could
>get just one, which is best for all users benefit?
>
>I did not get AS/Set because our Y2K consultants told my boss that AS/Set
was
>for software houses doing heavy duty software development work like whole
new
>modules & applications, not the kind of tailoring & tinkering & adding a
few
>fields hither thither that we are likely to need.  Cynical me thinks they
were
>setting themselves up for more future contracts with them that will cost my
>employer much more than AS/Set.
>
>Am I out of touch with reality?
>
>Case in point.  I need to make some relatively trivial modifications to
ORD590
>which looks to me to be a collection of AS/Setized programs that are
extremely
>difficult to reverse-engineer what the code is doing.  Many of the software
>objects are 1000 pages of uncompiled code, without internal documentation
of
>any significance.
>
>Al Macintyre
>Central Industries of Indiana
>Newcomer to RPG/400 but decades of experience on prior RPG such as S/36
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