Re: Customer Order Missing

from Al Macintyre

We use BPCS 405 CD mixed mode AS/436 V4R3 with intermittent problems with 
apparently losing customer orders ... is your pattern odd ball, in that most 
customer orders are keyed in & show up where they belong, while some go 
missing & you do not have a clue?  Do you have evidence that they did exist 
after the order entry person went to end of job?

We suspect that some people who do order entry occasionally take a wrong 
command key & do not realize that they have done so ... ie. they go through 
the motions of entering an order, then there is some command key to delete 
their entire effort that does not pop up with "are you sure" and they do not 
realize they have done that with some of their daily effort.  I suspect that 
ORD500 feeds data to some work file, so that command "wipe out my effort" 
means that no evidence gets to the master files, not even soft deleted.  All 
our paperwork associated with entering the customer order is initialled & 
stamped & etc. including the order # reference written there, but the person 
who just killed the order is oblivious to the fact that they did so.

We have people who are keying in customer orders & changes to customer orders 
all day long & what passes for BPCS audit trails are unreadable unusable to 
them.  Are there any fields in ECH ECL with something like "last activity by 
whom at some work station session" so we could generate a report ... here's 
all the orders you entered / changed today ... so you can check off if 
anything is missing.  ie. original paperwork wait until this report is 
generated before filing it away, possibly even with an attached order report 
that is meaningful to that personnel

ORD990 is the clean up of ECL ECH mismatches, but it does not get everything 
that is relevant.

We run a query report before ORD990 which lists ECL active records that do 
not have a corresponding ECH active ... there's stuff there that ORD990 does 
not touch.  In other words ORD990 is not catching active ECL records that are 
connected to a soft deleted ECH or vica versa.  ORD990 generates ORD991 audit 
trail which we print & feel tempted to modify to add more information about 
the lines that got deleted.  Our printed copy goes to the sales dept - 
sometimes they recognize numbers ... oh yes we know the story here, that 
order should go away ... what"s this ... a new problem for them to check out.

Depending on how you try to access mismatches between ECH & ECL, sometimes if 
one does not exist, you do not get to see the others.  This is because of how 
BPCS programs access records & sometimes choice of logical excludes certain 
kinds of records such as soft deleted, or query says "match" excluding 
no-match.

There is a scenario in which the ECH key gets magically changed to some other 
order #, without a satisfactory audit trail of this unauthorized & unwanted 
event ... all the ECL records are still there, but it appears like the order 
has disappeared.  If you can locate this & change it back (we use DFU to do 
this) then you are back in business no problem on that order, but suppose you 
do not catch it ... clean up is going to erase the orphans, unless the ECH 
was changed to the same order # as some other order # in the system, which 
has happened to us several times, and then we have another problem with some 
programs accessing the wrong header to process the other order.  

We have not yet mastered what triggers this scenario, or what kind of 
reporting tools are appropriate to locating such events ... I suspect that 
the contents of the raw physical ECH between reorgs should be in the sequence 
in which orders were added, so that a sequential listing of the file, before 
next reorg, to find any out of sequence, might be an approach to try, to find 
suspects that might need fixing before any reorg.

Check BPCS security ... who all is authorized to be changing or deleting 
customer orders ... do they have appropriate training, such as who to tell 
when they have an oops?  Check who has command line authority ... we have had 
some accidents with inappropriate use of DFU & possibly other areas.  For 
jobs that should be run when no one is on the system, such as ORD990, how do 
you enforce that?  We have had some oops with people signing on in the middle 
of jobs that should have been restricted.  We have a rule that billing & 
shipping should not be at same time & that customer order maintenance is 
supposed to stay out of orders that are currently in shipping or billing ... 
rules get broken.  How about at your company?

Someone mentioned BIL620 ... There are a bunch of BMRs on that program which 
I am struggling to merge with our modifications (mainly appearance of 
invoice, but there are some fields we mucked with) ... check OSG for the 
latest.

Our System Parameters say to save completed customer orders for a while, but 
not forever ... what end-of-month step is supposed to get rid of the 
soft-deleted ECH & ECL records of which we have thousands dated so old we 
think we are missing a step some place.

Al Macintyre

> From: KUSMAN@TAKEDA-ID.com (KUSMAN)
>  
>  Dear BPCS Professional
>  
>  We use V6002 C/S plf cum March 98 in AS/400 v3r7.
>  
>  We have entered 3 customer order after we accept the order was missing. I
>  check in ECH & ECL file, there was not recorded.
>  
>  Please help us.
>  
>  Thanks
>  
>  Kusman Lim
>  MIS Department
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