Re: Erroneous Balances in ILI/IWI

from Al Mac

Dick raised a good point ... sometimes we institute work-arounds for problems 
then forget they are work-arounds for something that needs to be fixed some 
time, until we find that we are drowning in work-arounds.  This came up for 
us recently when training a new person in a particular task.  She asked "What 
tells me this is the case & why can't it be right on the first screen we look 
at & how come we have to run tons of queries to find what data might be 
corrupted?"

I think it is a matter of scale.  If reorg truely fixes something that gets 
messed up, instead of locking mess up in place, sometimes it is simpler to 
just fix it & move on, than spend an eternity trying to figure out what 
caused it to be messed up.

But cycle counting theory says that when your data is incorrect, you have 
responsibilities to
1. Fix it ASAP
2. Figure out what caused it to go wrong.
3. Fix whatever it takes to prevent that from happening again.

We generally do not follow this practice because job responsibilities have 
been separated.
People, who discover stuff is messed up, learn to communicate only enough so 
that some other person will do step 1.

Right now I have about 10,000 garbage records, in customer orders & general 
ledger interfaces, needing incineration, so ASAP means making them invisible 
from BPCS programs until I figure out how best to erase them, let alone 
tackle what causes the garbage.

Since the reorgs, and MIS patches, do not add anything to the audit history, 
there is no picture to management of the degree to which we are having to fix 
BPCS data outside of the BPCS system, so they are unlikely to allocate 
resources to figure out how we can put a stop to it.

> From: Dick_Bailey@MCFA.COM (Bailey, Dick)

>   I respect the opinions of all who have responded to my posting and
>  thank them, but I have to ask - Why do we keep talking about doing re-orgs
>  to get the files in synch instead of fixing the causes? The one cause we
>  found this week generated at least 40% of the out-of-balance conditions I
>  found Monday night (by query), and with lots of help OGS has been searched
>  and an Incident Number has been established and we're looking for a fix 
from
>  SSA shortly.
>  
>   Our re-orgs over the past 6 months have locked in place incorrect
>  balances for at least 200 item numbers (found so far) and we have fixed 25
>  more that got generated during May.  Correcting those is going to take a 
lot
>  of work.
>  
>   Dick

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