Re: May 9 Billing

from Al Macintyre 405 CD ... basically the point I am in is trying to figure 
out whether the data is valid & then how I can show the users that it is 
valid, or determining that it is not valid & what has to be done to resolve 
it, then learning what all was done wrong this time around, that I have any 
control over.

> From: jbrown@behlen.ca (Jane Brown)
>  
>  A couple of weeks ago I asked the list about frequent decimal data errors 
> in IIM in field IPCTK.  Do you know if this is where your Decimal data error
>  originated?  

I know exactly where the error occurred, but I looked at all the data in the 
BBL file & could not see where the problem was ... had the user not taken C 
where she did, I could have got a dump that would have told me which record 
had what problem.

We got help from a normally reliable 3rd party to modify our invoices.  Their 
programmer saw "Document Number" and falsely assumed that was a numeric field 
so they moved the BPCS field into a numeric field & the failure was on the 
line that does that.

Now I have a modification fix for that which has been waiting all eternity 
for the accounting department to make some testing decisions.

I was using that version as I re-ran BBL records in small clusters, so if 
there was a failure I would not have 3 hours of clean-up & I had no failures, 
so I am really tempted to pre-empt the accounting department & install my 
modification without any formal testing or approval.

We also have a procedure for recovering from decimal data errors in billing 
that has been tested to avoid any problems & the users did not follow that 
procedure.

They acted, like they almost always do, like this was a brand new problem 
that had never happened before & they had no idea what to do, except miracle 
of miracles the newest member of the crew knew to get 2nd level help, but 
unfortunately after the barn door had been burned down by the first victim.

In the past our errors here have been due to shipping person keying some 
alpha character into the shipping document number field.

> We are journaling on the file now, but guess what?  No errors
>  since the journaling started.   We have had luck there because the users
>  never answer a message on their own, so if there is a decimal data error, I
>  cancel once, find and fix the error then you are given the retry option.  
No
>  mess to clean up!  Except if the error occurs in ord500.  The order looks
>  okay, but it isn't.  Easy to fix tho.  We are version 4.05cd also.

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