Re: BPCS Conversion Validation -- BPCS-L

When we converted to BPCS 405 CD we ran various reports - and compared totals 
page of before conversion vs. after conversion - did they agree?  In most 
cases they did not.  Looking at the total lines help us focus which listings 
have higher priority need greater attention.

Also check number of active records.  

Consider queries, or some other convenient reporting tool, in which 
side-by-side is some field from the before vs. after, in which we humans do 
not do any eyeball test - rather use query to print an asterisk along side 
any pair that is not identical, or in agreement with whatever the rule is on 
conversion of contents.  Without printing the reports, do a spool scan for 
the aserisk, or whatever character you used to flag the differences.  

There's a lot of population of fields that we are not interested in.  Let's 
just look at grand totals in major control files, and MRP big picture.  Run 
Planning on the data both before vs. after conversion - your exception 
reports should tell you to do the same things, if your inventory & open 
orders translated correctly.

Consider the query comparison on planned orders before & after a full regen 
--- if all your inventory & open orders were correctly translated, then the 
total quantity due on any given day for any item# should be in agreement - 
the before conversion & the after, with your query identifying which are in 
disagreement, if any.  This kind of strategy can help you locate 
discrepancies for investigation, instead of the rapidly tired human eyeball 
approach.

I am not familiar with JDEdwards, but do recall that MAPICS used to love 
fields filled with all 9's as an end marker, which is invalid for BPCS, 
although I have seen people keying that into expiration date, for something 
they do not want to expire.  You might want to consider some kind of a dump 
of files in which you scan for a string of nines to find any cases of MAPICS 
stuff creeping into BPCS without the mechanical process catching all the 
fields that need clean-up.

Soon after our conversion, we did a physical inventory of one factory, to 
determine what the problems were with the physical inventory process, which 
had run into a lot of hassles during the conversion, fortunately more due to 
human unfamiliarity with the details, than SSA irregularities, then after we 
got an accuracy in the high 90 percentiles, we did physicals at the other 
factories.  This also goes a long way to convince non-technical 
middle-management that we have things under control.

Al Macintyre
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