Shop Orders & Suicide -- BPCS-L

We at Central have discovered the hard way several things we should NEVER do 
in BPCS 405 CD & Al volunteers this attempt at a brief warning.  What is real 
unfortunate is that thanks to employee turn-over, and a lack of a good way to 
store relevant types of corporate memory, we have re-learned some of this 
stuff, after having been burned exactly the same way before.

There are numbers issued sequentially that can be reset in SYS800, but great 
card is wise when doing so.  Let's say you go back to start & some real old 
orders exist in reality & in history.  The system won't issue a duplicate 
order, but SFC300 doesn't discriminate between stuff posted to the latest 
issuing of an order#, and labor posted against the same order # for a 
different item # etc. dated before this order was issued.  This makes for 
very confusing inquiry.  Bottom line, if you reset starting #, you do not 
want new issues of orders on #s pre-existing in history, so select that 
starting # very carefully.

History retention can be reduced, but you do not want to make it shorter than 
the time period that you need shop orders on-line, because CST900 checks the 
history of what was posted to a shop order to decide if it should be purged, 
but if you've purged the history it needs to see, like we did (to try to 
solve the SFC300 problem), then legitimate orders, otherwise ready to purge, 
don't.  It might be smart to have a Query listing shop orders older than some 
time period (date math between *CURRENT date & date of shop order release) to 
correlate your retention time period with a policy to recycle the oldest 
orders, replacing them with newer counter-parts.

With SYS800, we can activate applications we're interested in buying for the 
purpose of looking into what they do.  Resist the temptation to do this in 
your production environment.  Turning PRF on & off is like giving poison to 
shop orders.

OSG has a FAQ on issues surrounding the closing of shop orders, like items 
with no routings (labor posting is needed to code as complete), outside 
operations that are never matched with ACP, and what flags we can be 
checking.  Sometimes we have new people unfamiliar with our numbering systems 
who look at BOM to decide what to release & BPCS will let you release a shop 
order on a purchased part - we adjusted our shop paper to flag this when it 
happens.

Al Macintyre
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