Re: Billing Invoice BIL500 -- BPCS-L

I did this Interactively Thurs nite & noted exact statistics
1 minute 10 seconds execution time - I have no complaints with that
all 4 warehouses did shipping
volume was 60 orders
80 items or ECL variant lines got sent
15 of them were inter-company
12 real customers were sent shipments
This volume is typical
This was a good test of my latest mod, although I had no garbage in

Everyone else had gone home so the system only had me & M/36 jobs visible & a
couple gone homes left at BPCSMENU.  System statistics 72 active jobs due to
665 unprinted reports.  75% disk space consumed.

David Shea had some slick ideas on archival data similar to the discussion on
thread "BPCS 405 CD wasted disk space"

> They had five years of invoice data swimming around in the database.

Some BPCS file retention is open to parameters selecting how long while other
files build to infiinity.  I would like a "BPCS for Dummies" book that
identifies which are which by release.

Andrew Murphy said
> We have been informed by SSA that NO users can be on the system while BIL500
is running

I suggest you double check that advice - we found on BPCS/36 that it was not
smart to have heavy user access updating CUSTOMER ORDER DATA at the same time
as BIL500, because the staff doing ORD500 generally did not know which
shipments went out today, so it was impractical to enforce "Do not be updating
customer order 12345 that we shipped against today, at the same time as the
accounting dept is billing it."  At the same time, we don't want shipping to
be adding to the BBL file with additional shipments at the same time
accounting is billing off of that file.

What we do is use a combination of voice phone calls & OS/400 MSG
1. Shipping personnel inform billing clerk when they are done for the day's
shipments.
2. When billing clerk ready to do BIL500, she first informs ORD500 crew & they
get off for the 5 minutes it takes to do billing, actually until she says
she's done, because we have an intermittent decimal data error due to a flawed
modification - another story.
3. If all shipping facilities have not checked in by end of accounting clerk
work day, she informs MIS nite operator of status, who contacts the hold-outs.

Another related issue that we solved was too many cooks messing with the same
requirements & getting in each other's way - the sales manager has split up
the ORD500 crew so that different people specialize in different customers &
model lines, so only one person generally is updating a particular family of
products.

Further investigation

I have a modification in the works for which I needed to know what files
receive data from billing.   Part of the mod will be to extract date of last
shipment & quantity shipped on that date for a particular item to customer
from warehouse & I am tentatively planning to add a logical to SIL for that.

Some BIL500 output & update files are not relevant to my current plans but I
noticed GJW in here - that's one busy file that does not re-use deleted work
space & in our environment adds over 100,000 deleted records / month that were
not going any where useful.

The S/36 version of SIL had no SSA provision to purge ancient history,
building to infinity & I would not be surprised if BPCS 405 CD is the same
way.

Bottom Line

There are files we can set parameters on how long to keep archives on-line in
production environment, for which David has suggested could be moved to a
history environment.

There are files that accumulate history to infinity wih no SSA provision for
clean up.  It is our responsibility to identify what they are & figure out
what to do about them.  Via BPCS_L we can help each other figure this out by
version & module, and for all I know, BPCS_L archives already have the
answers.  But ultimately I think this info belongs in a "BPCS for Dummies
book."

There are files that accumulate deleted records eating disk space for no good
long term reason, in which our options are being discussed in the thread
"Deleted Wasted Space".

Al
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