Re: Conversion Curiosity

[DAsmussen@xxxxxxx]

Al,

In a message dated 4/7/99 2:08:33 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
MacWheel99@aol.com writes:

<<snip>>
> 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?

The glitches are always there, no matter the vendor or the package.  
Manufacturing packages in general are worse due to the increased complexity, 
but I remember fighting with IBM over a 36->400 DMAS migration where the A/R 
aged trial balance didn't tie out between systems -- how hard can _THAT_ be?

To SSA's credit, they have certainly improved their upgrade process from the 
piece of scrap we started with two years ago, and even beyond the 11/97 CUM 
we ended up going live with at the first plant last year (at least it doesn't 
convert all your closed shop orders to open anymore).  On the other hand, the 
upgrade process is _FAR_ inferior to pre-V5 conversions, IMO.  Personally, if 
I focused on it for a couple of weeks, I could probably rip out the 
intermediate steps and reduce overall upgrade time 200 fold -- but I haven't 
seen an upgrade program in almost 19 years that I _COULDN'T_ do this to.  
Problem is, earlier SSA upgrades didn't need to be improved like this...

JMHO,

Dean Asmussen
Enterprise Systems Consulting, Inc.
Fuquay-Varina, NC  USA
E-mail:  DAsmussen@aol.com

"The greatest joy in life is doing what others say you cannot do." -- Walter 
Bagehot
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