Re: Why did you choose BPCS

Sorry Dean, you mucked up the most important fact -- Covey wrote BPCS on his
aunt's kitchen table!




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|        |          DAsmussen@aol|
|        |          .com         |
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|        |          06/11/99     |
|        |          01:42 AM     |
|        |          Please       |
|        |          respond to   |
|        |          BPCS-L       |
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  |                                                                            |
  |       To:     BPCS-L@midrange.com                                          |
  |       cc:     (bcc: Dan Mitchell/Nexgen)                                   |
  |       Subject:     Re: Why did you choose BPCS                             |
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Dan,

In a message dated 6/9/99 3:27:11 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
DThomas@lpw-mdi.com writes:

> 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.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a package called BPCS.
 Rumor has it that Roger Covey wrote it in his garage over a weekend, and the
giant entity know as SSA has been maintaining it ever since.  Up through
version 4.05, BPCS was extremely stable and far outpaced its competitors in
the AS/400 market in terms of stability, useability, and functionality --
especially for process control manufacturers.

Then a new management team (music - dom, dom, dom, dom de dom, dom de dom)
declared the AS/400 dead and that SSA needed to port BPCS to UNIX.  Said
management team decided to port BPCS into their CASE tool, AS/Set, because
AS/Set would soon generate C code instead of it's usual RPG and it had the
GUI IWS front-end.  Consideration was not given to the fact that they'd been
working on IWS for over three years and it still did not function properly.
After purchasing high-powered PC's for their development staff, SSA
discovered that IWS was not useful for the BPCS conversion because it did not
support message ID's on screens to support international language
development, so pure AS/Set was used instead.

ADK, UDK, UDK-U, and whatever else they decided to call it never generated C
code.  BPCS 5.x was 4.05 ported into AS/Set ADK, except that SSA was not
satisfied with simply rewriting the code and seeing if it worked -- no, we've
got to add functionality as well so that we can't tell if the rewrite or the
tool or the enhancements caused the problems that they had.  Then, SSA
decided that ADK, which had previously been widely available, would be taken
off the market for all but BPCS users.  The "powers that be" then decided
that BPCS needed GUI so, without fixing the problems that arose with the
advent of V5, they created V6 by front-ending "green screen" panels utilizing
a "screen scraper" called ODO and again re-writing OE and accounting modules
calling it CEA and COM.  The UNIX port was achieved by utilizing a
"skunkworks" utility that converted ADK RPG into C.

Tragic, but no, this was not yet enough.  We had to have DOCA.  Unable to get
IWS working properly after now five years, yet even newer managers thought
that they could write a CORBA compliant tool FROM SCRATCH in less than a
year.  First introduced at the Fall '95 AS/Set user's group meeting, ODW
(NEWI, then ODW again) has yet to be released to the general public and when
it is will be available to BPCS users only.  Just what we need, another
friggin' proprietary development tool for BPCS.  If you're lucky enough to
get ODW, you then have to purchase NT and MS/SQL Server.  JAVA's looking
better all the time.

These moves have led to phrases such as "What do you expect from a company
that's ASS, backwards", "BPCS - Big Pile of Chicken, uh, Stuff", and my own
favorite "BPCS - Better Programs Coming Soon" from the user community.  New,
new, new management at SSA has attempted to right past wrongs and I must
admit that helpline has gotten better as long as you call between 8 and 5
Central US time.  One still must wonder why so many people say that 6.1 is a
more stable release, yet that stability hasn't trickled down to the 6.0.04
and 6.0.02 users.  One must also wonder why helpline still thinks it's "no
big deal" for a heavily modified shop with over 1K active users to "drop in"
a new release.  One does _not_ wonder why their stock is hovering around $2
USD per share.

However, BPCS still beats what we in the South call the "Tea-Waddin'" out of
90% of its competition based upon price-performance.  Just how many failed
SAP implementations do you see in "The Trades" versus failed BPCS
implementations?  Done right, BPCS is still a good package.  Most of the
problems related here are due to "specialty" implementations of code that
wasn't tested thoroughly by SSA, "bleeding edgers" who stick in new stuff
like OLM before it's had time to be properly exercised in the field, and
"tightwads" that try to drop in BPCS without the proper guidance.  Oliver
Wight places choosing software at number twelve in the twenty-five steps to
MRP implementation, yet how many companies perform 1-11 prior to choosing a
package?  If you do not perform due diligence up front, do not expect a
software package to solve all of your ills...

JMHO,

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

"Love means never having to say you're sorry." -- Love Story (Guess we know
why they called it a _STORY_) -- Anonymous
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