Re: LOCKED RECORDS -- BPCS-L

from Al Macintyre

We are moving more heavily into PC support than in times past & have some 
interest in trying to avoid replicating the pitfalls of the BPCS using 
companies more experienced than us in this area.

> Subj:  RE: LOCKED RECORDS
>  Date:    99-11-10 08:24:22 EST
>  From:    chales@schukra.com (Christine Hales)
  
>   We have several issues with PC "lock-ups", that we are starting to bring 
>  under control.  One of the biggest contributors to lock-ups was having an 
>  email package open at the same time as BPCS.  Also, moving from a Win95 to 
>  a WinNT machine helped.

Our shipping departments have a PC whose BPCS involvement is to get shipping 
documents to a dot matrix printer (multi part paper), and whose PC 
applications include bar coding to a laser printer, packages supplied by 
shippers such as UPS.  At one point in time the PC has the gas to do the job 
right, but there is growth in individual applications, such as fonts for the 
bar code application, that leads to the PC no longer having the gas for 
current reality.

The bar coding application is totally independent of BPCS which causes some 
problems ... instead of the shipping application interfaced to something that 
generates the correct bar code labels for what we are to ship, someone is 
manually selecting the right label & human error when doing this is 
considerably higher than what is tolerable for our customers & QC ... there 
are some cases in which if we want to keep the business, we need 
zero-tolerance for any error.

Another source of error is a slow printer for shipping documents ... the 
users sometimes say "we are all done" except for what has not been printed 
yet, so they do not see errors that have not yet been printed.  I do not know 
why we have to have printers so slow that we are faced with this reality ... 
I suspect growth in volume ... the printers were probably adequate for our 
shipping volume when we first got them.

>   Our Invoice Entry issue, however, was picked up when the A/P people 
>  noticed that when one individual was printing cheques - everyone else 
would 
>  freeze until the cheques were actually printing.  I could understand if 
the 
>  cheque printing and the invoicing were being done for the same company, 
but 
>  they are separate companies being worked on.  

Did anyone other than the A/P people notice this ... in other words were ONLY 
the A/P applications frozen up, which might indicate inefficient access to 
A/P people files.
Does this happen when checks are being created at any work station?
Does this happen when other special forms are being created?
It might not be a BPCS problem but some bottleneck in access to a shared 
printer spool.

>  Of course, the helpline could not duplicate .....  
>  We ended up putting a process in place so that this 
>  situation would not occur.
>  
>           -Christine
>  
>  On Tuesday, November 09, 1999 10:18 PM, Ata510@aol.com 
>  [SMTP:Ata510@aol.com] wrote:

>  > BMR43360 addresses PC Lockups as described by your note, 
>  > and the BMR is not completed because they have not yet 
>  > determined the root cause of the problem.
>  > However, several "Service Packs" exist for the PC Newi software that 
help 
>  > reduce the problem. Make sure you have those latest ones, at least, and 
>  > keep checking SSA for progress on the BMR analysis.
>  >
>  > >Most of our locked records are due to PC lock-ups in 
>  > >Invoice Entry (ACP500).
>  > >The PC locks up in the middle of keying an invoice 
>  > >and you cannot back out of A/P 
>  > >or use any other application on the PC.  
>  > >The only choice is to reboot the machine.
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