Re: Billing Invoice BIL500 -- BPCS-L

Our BIL500 typically takes less than 5 minutes to process less than 100
shipments per day, in terms of customer orders hit.  We also only run invoices
once per day, after all 4 warehouses have completed their shipping which
occurs intermittently during the day.  Sometimes a location is working late &
the accounting clerk asks me to run billing in the evening, when I am usually
working on programming & backups & etc.   No problem.

What is involved for our billing is
1. We run a bunch of queries off of BBL & other files to give an overall
perspective on today's shipments for reference by management, sales, and plant
personnel.
2. BIL500 for all customers

When I am doing it, I leave the invoices on line for accounting clerk to print
off next day.  We don't bother with any edit.  We did modify BIL522 appearance
of invoice, and I modified BIL500 very heavily on BPCS/36 to create a system
similar to that which SSA created on BIL/400 but was not available on BPCS/36,
which I thought was a bit of a kludge, not real elegant programming on my
part, but a bunch of users & management personnel have since told me that it
was much easier to operate for shipping personnel than the version SSA has
provided us in our Y2K solution, and my list of modifications needs to include
a periodic review to see if there is any way to simplify the process.

Thus, I am somewhat familiar with what is going on - there is a LOT of
processing & updates behind the scenes.  Try doing IBM's DSPPGMREF on BIL5* to
see what all programs & files are involved - it is extensive.  I am currently
digging into exactly that to figure out how best to extract some information
for one of our most ambitious reports which drags information from all over
the BPCS landscape into a big picture on where we are, and what progress we
are making, meeting all the customer requirements.  Since it was converted
from BPCS/36, and heavily modified by me over almost 15 years, starting its
career as a MAPICS modification, it is not exactly efficient.

We are BPCS 405 CD on Green Screen using AS/436 9402-436 with RISC-2102 also
accessing BPCS/36 history that we did not convert, and some other non-BPCS
running 48 bit SSP 7.5 in Machine 36 guest mode of OS/400 V3R7M0, soon to
upgrade to V4R3.  We do have some performance problems, but solving them is
not our highest agenda - we have much more important challenges to meet.

Al Macintyre
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