BPCS Support Conceptual Expectations 2 -- BPCS-L

Wendy wrote in answer to my think question about the challenges of SSA
upgrades & testing, and what seems reasonable, and what to expect as we move
forwards in "BPCS Upgrade Test Support Staff Challenges" and after I had asked
about the relative merits of Robot & other tools, in "Clarify As/Set?"

> I am unclear as to what you mean by C/S support has a higher
>  MIS overhead than the green screen support?   Do you mean hardware wise or
>  resource wise?  I would say that enduser training wise it has required more
>  personnel resources but that is due to needing to train people on PC's and
>  windows 95 more than on how to use the C/S version of BPCS once they have
>  basic PC training.

This is a question that is best addressed by people who have recently gone
thru a transition from the Green Screen world to the C/S World.  I am in an
environment dominated by Green Screen with growing PC emulation.  

Many hires quickly adapt to computer literacy for our environment but others
perpetually struggle with such fundamentals as: spool file manipulation; where
is my batch jobq; 2nd level help; command key navigation; etc.  These are
people whose value to the corporation is in the work they were hired to do &
they do it well, but their productivity is inextricably linked to the computer
interfaces that they need to do their work, and part of my job is to support
their productivity when using our computer system. 

I have made it unneccessary to memorize hot key commands by placing on BPCS
user menus such things as the command to transfer to M/36 & view your
WRKSBMJOB & like that.   Basically most everything on the pop-up menu that is
frequently needed is also on the User Menu, because it is a training issue for
some people to have to cope with both a regular Menu & other kinds of menus.  

We always have a population of users who will never GET IT on things that
their co-workers take for granted & are lost on how else to explain.  Now put
those same people in the scenario where they have to function in Green Screen
functions AND GUI stuff AND the interface between the PC and AS/400, and that
is ONE training challenge, that is sometimes met by a division of
responsibilities - one person in a department or office gets & distributes
reports generated by people who will always be lost coping with printer
controls & spool file commands.

We have Green Screens all over the Factory Floor, in which there is a Sign-On
& Password Taped Up beside the Display.  This gets Supervisors & Group Leaders
& Factory Machine Setup People to a User Menu with no Command Line Authority &
purely inquiry options like SFC300 & INV300 & BOM300 & stuff like that.  If
they accidentally F3 out of BPCS, it takes them to *SIGNOFF so they do not
fall into the OS/400 Menus.  

These work stations cost the company $250.00 each, are powered on all the
time, and have a useful life of 10 years before they have to be replaced.
When these functions get replaced in a later SSA version by GUI, we would have
to replace these $250.00 dumb terminals with $2,500.00 PCs which have a useful
life of much less than 10 years & need periodic upgrades to get satisfactory
performance.

PCs need to get human attention more often & more intrusively than Green
Screen.  This might be related to sticker shock from Maintenance Contracts,
leading to higher Operation Costs in reality.  We get a Green Screen with 3
year free maintenance, and when it does break down, getting it fixed or
replaced is a 2 day disruption at worst, because the end user can talk to the
IBM tech by phone in sufficient detail to nail down the problem & start the
fix process.  Diagnosing what is wrong with a PC is beyond a lot of people,
and they get into trouble with a frequency astronomically greater than the
frequency of Green Screen failures.

So beyond the question of staffing requirements & corporate investment to be
able to continue to do a competent job in MIS, there are issues of how best to
get training to effectively help our end users who have such diverse needs.
Currently we use the DOMINO THEORY of training.  

Various Power Users get all the education they can absorb, in how BPCS works
on our computer system, and how we can do various kinds of troubleshooting &
polish short cuts, then they have the task of training co-workers. in other
departments, then new hires are shown the ropes by other folks in their
department, that probably got a crash course in the basics, from the former
person doing that job right before they left us.  Over time we lose a lot of
corporate memory & have to constantly re-learn what someone once knew.

Al Macintyre
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