Re: Can you help me?

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

> From: xinxia@ncsi.com.cn (Li Xin Xia)

>  > Hi,
>  >    I am looking for some information about BPCS product. I am very that
>  > you can help me. May you give me the following information about BPCS
>  > product?
>  >    a. Market share
>  >    b. Sales performance
>  >    c. List of existing users (in China)
>  >    d. Technical platform/database used.
>  > 
>  >    sindy

I can answer some but not all of this.

According to an article in Midrange ERP magazine which I read about 6 months 
ago, some version of BPCS is used at 20,000 mid-sized manufacturing companies 
world wide.  I do not have the article handy ... their URL is
http://www.mfg-erp.com

My reccollection was that out of over 100 different manufacturing software 
packages for mid sized enterprises, there were only 2-3 with a larger market 
share.  The article also broke it down by type of manufacturing ... 
automotive, pharmasceuticals, etc. many major sectors.  If you do not limit 
yourself to mid-sized enterprises, there are hundreds of manufacturing 
software packages being sold in the USA - I do not know about world wide.

These companies are very secretive about market share, but what might be more 
important is how well they are doing in the stock market ... which ones will 
still be around 10-20 years from now ... you want a supplier that will go the 
distance.

BPCS runs on IBM AS/400 platform which has universal data base but BPCS only 
uses some of it & not very well, because BPCS is designed to run on many 
different platforms/data bases, many more than most of their competition is 
able to support ... in other words if you want a package that runs really 
really good on a particular platform/data base/high level language you should 
get one that is designed to ONLY run on that combination, but then you are 
betting your enterprise survival on one combination that might not survive in 
competiton with others.

BPCS also runs on an HP UNIX platform which I am not familiar with.
BPCS also runs on Windows NT.

BPCS is supplied by SSA & their international partners ... check out web site 
HQ
http://www.ssax.com/

There are certain versions of BPCS platform combinations that SSA officially 
supports as being Y2K compliant, and there are many other versions in use 
that authorized 3rd party BPCS consultants support on other platforms, but 
they are platforms that once upon a time SSA supported then dropped, such as 
IBM S/36 SSP.

As important as the manufacturing software package is the quality of the 
hardware that it runs on ... I consider IBM reputation for Quality to be far 
higher than that of Microsoft ... now China has a reputation in this country 
which may not be deserved that there allegedly is a much higher degree of 
software piracy there than in the USA.  If you have any collegues so 
inclined, I warn you that you will not be successful in pirating IBM stuff on 
midrange computers, but also from a computer security perspective, no one 
should be able to steal from you if you are running on an IBM platform, 
unless you run it with poor security settings.  

Computer viruses & hackers & phreakers are found in the Microsoft world but 
are unheard of on AS/400.  Unix has some of that kind of problem - I don't 
know about HP.  I imagine other people will have differing opinions on this 
topic.

There is also an issue of volatility of platform ... there are constantly new 
& supposedly improved versions coming out, but many enterprises are quite 
happy with the old versions & do not want to spend lots of money to get 
current, but if you do not stay current you lose tech support.  A nice aspect 
of AS/400 is that when there are upgrades to the operating system, you do not 
have to replace the application software that is running on it ... this is 
not neccessarily true about new versions of Windows.  The last time anyone 
needed to make significant changes to their application software running on 
AS/400 platform was when IBM went from CISC to RISC & that was still 
optional, to get the speed benefits.  I imagine that when we go from 64 bit 
to 96 bit or beyond that the same kind of upgrade may be desired.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
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