RE: Can you help me? -- BPCS-L

I am not at the office right now. If you need to get in contact with me 
urgently I can be reached on 40192419.

Best regards,

Kim Schroder

>>> "BPCS-L@midrange.com" 03/20/00 15:35 >>>


You will probably find BPCS to be less expensive to implement and easier to
use once you have it running.



                                                                                
              
                    Li Xin Xia                                                  
              
                    <xinxia@ncsi.co        To:     BPCS-L@midrange.com          
              
                    m.cn>                  cc:                                  
              
                    Sent by:               Subject:     RE: Can you help me?    
              
                    owner-bpcs-l@mi                                             
              
                    drange.com                                                  
              
                                                                                
              
                                                                                
              
                    03/20/2000                                                  
              
                    02:45 AM                                                    
              
                    Please respond                                              
              
                    to BPCS-L                                                   
              
                                                                                
              
                                                                                
              



Hi,
           Thank you very much for your help! I am sorry that I have one
more
question. Is there any difference between BPCS and Symix? Because my boss
asked me to find this information for a project, but I have so poor
knowledge about ERP, I must ask help from you. If you know it, can you tell
me?
           Thank you again for your kind help!!

yours,
           sindy



-----Original Message-----
From: MacWheel99@aol.com [mailto:MacWheel99@aol.com]
Sent: 2000***3*��20*�� 14:09
To: BPCS-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: Can you help me?


> 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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