Conversion Curiosity

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

How does the quality of SSA's conversion tools, for going between versions, 
evolve over time?  Is it a collection of services that BPCS users can 
anticipate that some day SSA will get it right, or is it such a low priority 
for SSA, compared to other BMRs, that we can always expect them to be 
unreliable, as BPCS versions march forward & BPCS shops want to rely on SSA's 
upgrade tools?

10 years ago we might have used SSA's conversion tool from MAPICS to BPCS 
were it not for the fact that our MAPICS was heavily modified, and at the 
time, we were also dramatically altering our Bill-of-Materials between deep & 
flat structure (degree to which sub-assemblies are given an identity).

1 year ago we tried to use SSA's conversion tools from BPCS/36 through BPCS 
405 CD but gave up due to a combination of the need to go end-to-end within a 
weekend, SSA had no provision for combining data bases into facilities, there 
were many glitches in the official conversion.  Our modifications were not an 
issue in deciding to abandon the SSA path, since we abandoned them & returned 
to vanilla, placing all our special stuff in user-defined fields, but once we 
abandoned the SSA path, various folks on the project team came up with new 
ways of structuring things that the SSA path was not designed to handle, but 
3rd party tools had no problems with.

In recent discussions of going to V6.something, others have written of 
glitches in the SSA conversion tools.

Are the glitches always there?  Proportionally, are the problems in the SSA 
conversion comparable to the problems in the rest of SSA products - a 
nuisance that goes with the territory, that SSA continuously strives to 
improve, or does SSA appear to give less attention to conversion support than 
it deserves, so that as versions march into the future, SSA conversion tools 
will always be problematic?

Al
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