Re: Bogus Location Transactions

from Al Macintyre BPCS 405 CD Rel 2 OS/400 V4R3

One of my collegues tracked down what is triggering this problem that we have 
discovered in the last 2 days, and there is now a modification request to 
change the JIT600 screen to prevent negative input to rejects or good 
quantity.  

We previously did a modification to block fractional quantities because some 
people had been keying the hours data into the quantity fields.  We also have 
an occasional problem with people keying the shop order number into the hours 
field, so there has been some discussion about blocking hours input that 
exceeds 25 (valid for a machine running continuously on the day that the 
daylight savings changes).

I had previously suggested that it was valid to deliberately key negatives 
there as a way of backing out discoveries of incorrectly entered 
transactions, but since the field minus key is very close to the field exit 
key on some keyboards, this can happen by el typo error.  We now speculate 
that quantity minus in JIT600 is a scenario that was inconceivable to SSA 
programmers so that their testing failed to explore that the software working 
correctly there, so that negative input there is not a safe action.

We found 10 other apparent field minus errors dating back to February.

Using our test environment Jerry duplicated the scenario, so we are pretty 
certain of the explanation.

When different people are entering labor transactions, BPCS assigns ticket 
numbers that apply globally to everyone who is entering them, in sequence.  
When one person enters a negative quantity rejected, apparently BPCS grabs 
other transactions that have not yet been posted, from current batches in 
process, and declares them to be under lot control, and some of the relevant 
actions get processed & some do not.

Which transactions get doubled or tripled is all the timing problem of whose 
data is in unposted batch status at the time that the negative input gets 
processed.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
+---
| This is the BPCS Users Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to BPCS-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to BPCS-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to BPCS-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner: dasmussen@aol.com
+---