Re: New to BPCS_L .... misc. resources -- BPCS-L

Bob Mack - depending on how new you are to this listing, note that I also
posted some resources like this in the thread "BPCS User Groups" and various
other people have been posting BPCS web sites in various threads associated
with solutions you can get from ARCTOOLS & ROBOT & NEXGEN & etc.

Dean posts his guidelines from time to time & perhaps there could be a monthly
or quarterly re-print of an updated directory of BPCS resources - BPCS Forums,
BPCS Education available, BPCS Tips newsletters subscription info, Calendar of
Annual BPCS User Conferences, Directory of BPCS Consultants, Directory of BPCS
User Groups, how to subscribe to SSA's e-newsletter, and so forth, so that new
participants who show up after this latest round, do not miss out on BPCS
goodies - no heavy commercialism for any entries, just info, with perhaps some
flagged *** for how heavily some of those folks have been contributing to
BPCS_L.

Various dead tree periodicals send subscribers occasional useful reference
guides such as

Midrange Vendors Yellow Pages
AT&T directory of 1-800 #s by product category

Some of this kind of thing is moving to CD Rom & Internet but I like the old
fashioned cross reference sources, especially when models undergo vendor name
changes & we seek to back trace some outfit, or we remember the name & want to
pass contact info to a collegue.  Some catalogs have great illustrations of
configuration options & directories of vendors by product type - one of my
favorite catalongs is System 3X/4xxx warehouse www.systems3x.com

Some hardware vendors have fax back service for info on products, but what I
really want is info on IBM stuff that has been discontinued but is in 3rd
party market with great prices & I want to know what the features are of that
stuff.

Because my employer subscribes to AS/400 magazine, we just got the 1999 AS/400
Buyer's Guide & I went browsing

Shock

SSA is not listed under Manufacturing Software (could it be because IBM
dropped all vendors that neglected to tell IBM they were Y2K compliant?) or
even in the index by vendor name --- someone slipped up.   They do not need to
advertise to customers that know about SSA but forget what all is offered, but
it might be smart 
if companies using AS/400, that are shopping around for an alternative
manufacturing package, did find SSA in resources like this one.

You can get a free subscription to IBM's AS/400 magazine at
www.as400.ibm.com/magazine but watch out, the ratio of commercials to
meaningful interesting content is often worse than late nite TV infomercials -
value somewhat inverse to ERP Magazine which is my current manufacturing
topics favorite magazine, outside the strictly technical stuff.

In this latest IBM buyer's guide for AS/400, I checked the obvious places for
BPCS

BPCS Education & Training is mentioned for Unbeaten Path International
upi@excpc.com --- I happen to know there's others out there, such as SSA & our
Y2K consultants, I was just curious to see what familiar names are present &
absent - Hey you can get a 2 year degree in AS/400 at a Technical College in
Rochester MN & a couple other places.

BPCS Consulting Services are listed for some outfits I had heard of before
like Unbeaten Path (above) and NexGen www.nexgeninfo.com and from one that was
new to me = Case Consulting www.ccginc.net but of course there's BPCS outfits
I know about that aint here like SSA. 

There's also indexes of key words like BPCS, but more than one index so you
gotta know which one to look for what in.

Al
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