Re: Why did you choose BPCS -- BPCS-L

The people who decide how much money to spend & what features to buy &
The people tasked with managing what is purchased
are often 2 different populations.

At the end of two conversions ago, when there was a consistent pattern to the 
user grievances, I showed my boss the advertising for a package that seemed 
to have everything everyone was screaming they wanted & were displeased was 
not in the package we got & I asked if that package was considered in the 
process of evaluating alternatives & if so, why we chose as we did.  The 
answer was yes - that package seemed perfect from perspective of what people 
in the company wanted, except the price was 10 times what upper management 
was willing to pay.

Marketing information about one package or another vs.
Reality about what is inside that package & its level of support
are like 2 different universes.

I have worked with purchased packages that were not 1/100th as good as BPCS 
except their marketing promises were vastly superior to what is promised by 
BPCS promotions.

BPCS works - companies are able to function using BPCS.  That really is the 
bottom line.  Can you run your business using the package?

I have had co-workers describe job interviews & contacts with other places 
they were considering going to work for, in which they backed out.  Other 
places running their businesses on packages other than BPCS have to do a 
whole lot more work & do not have information that is anything like as swell 
as we have with BPCS.  Those companies were also able to function, but forget 
about being competitive or knowing where your costs are in the production 
process.

With BPCS, we are able to accept a customer order one day, and same day do 
production on the customer rush requirements.  Depending on part complexity, 
we have on occasion been able to manufacture same day as customer panic phone 
call to us, and ship from a different city than the customer phoned into.  A 
few days ago, a customer phoned in a set of changes to their requirements 
that were extremely urgent & we ran an MRP net change over the lunch break 
with same day production change in direction to meet the customer's needs.  
We got the job done, thanks to BPCS & competent inter-company verbal 
communications about what was happening.

No doubt there are other packages that can be as responsive, but the bottom 
line is whether BPCS can be a partner in managing your corporate needs, at a 
price that upper management is willing to pay.  We are a job shop for 
manufacturing wiring harnesses to customer order - they supply the blueprints 
& we manufacture to match their requirements.  

When we selected BPCS as our Y2K solution, we had looked at over 100 other 
packages, because of unhappiness with various features of how BPCS/36 
functioned & could only conclude that while there is a lot of competition out 
there for manufacturing packages, there is also a lot of competition out 
there for delivering crud & packages that lack a lot of what we considered to 
be essentials.

There were many features of other packages that we wanted, and do not have 
today with BPCS, but the packages with great desirable features were often 
lacking in core requirements.  I am sure that the people who think PCs are 
great, but have to do their job on twinax, might also have features they wish 
the company had purchased, but it is self evident to me that PCs are a luxury 
that a lot of companies do not need to be competitive.

As a programmer, serving the needs of some 20 odd hands-on users & 20 
managers & supervisors who work with the reports, the people who tend to get 
MIS attention are the most squeaky wheels, not the people for whom it is in 
the best interests of the corporation to help them become more productive.

On a forum like this, you are not going to get a lot of input from people 
working for companies that have been able to invest the bucks to learn how to 
use their systems to the fullest potential, and buy more than adequate 
resources, but rather those of us on a more economical budget who seek 
economy of scale of information sharing with other users willing to help each 
other out.

We have tons of success stories using BPCS, but what you will hear from us 
are not how we have used BPCS successfully to run our businesses, but where 
we are having problems & need help.  I rarely have problems with my Honda 
automobile or many other possessions, but when I tell my friends about my 
apartment, or home PC, what they hear is the bad news, the problems, the 
chinese curse of interesting experiences, not the history that my Honda's 
downtime is less than an AS/400.  That is human nature.

Al Macintyre

>  From:        DThomas@lpw-mdi.com (Dan Thomas)

>  I've followed this mail list for about five months now and most of the
>  comments seem to be rather negative about performance and stability.  I
>  realize these forums are not always indicative of the entire user base, but
>  I'm curious what is driving users to choose BPCS or even stay with it.  
>  
>  Dan Thomas
>  Sr. VP Information Systems
>  Medical Distribution, Inc.
>  4500 Progress Blvd
>  Louisville, KY  40218-5058
>  Phone (502) 454-9013 ext 120
>  email  DThomas@lpw-mdi.com
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