Re: cst900 -- BPCS-L

From Al Macintyre BPCS 405 CD mixed mode green screen & PC emulation

We try to run CST900 weekly, on the same nite of each week so folks know what 
to expect.  We run it for all facilities.  When a physical inventory is due 
in the near future for a particular facility we run that facility's CST900 
every few days, so as to minimize the shop orders that are still open on the 
eve of their physical.

>  From:    Cdoe@barton-instruments.com (Chick Doe)

>  how often and when do organizations fun cst900? we are on bpcs ver6.04.
>  
>  we typically run cst900 at month-end and it takes several hours. 

Our CST900 runs faster when:
we run it more often ,,, but it still can take several hours if not done 
other stuff
we have run an SYS120 reorg within the past 24 hours ... this alone can 
change the run time of CST900 be 1/2 hour instead of 3 1/2 hours ... thus the 
fact that SYS120 takes 45 minutes to run the whole thing F6 F18 F6 F6 means 
that if CST900 is due now & we have not run SYS120 for about a week, we do it 
first before starting CST900
refrain from other stuff on system 400 concurrently so that it can eat as 
much resources as it can take
The fact that CST900 ran means that there are less ancient shop orders 
sitting out there in the files, which means that even with new shop orders 
added since the last time we ran it, there are still less open on average 
when CST900 is run regularly, than infrequently, so less stuff to wade thru.

I would run CST900 every nite if it wasn't for that **** swear word **** 
CST270 filling up spool file requiring NOMAX stupid reply.  This is crying 
out for some kind of modification.

a) Is there some way to have the CL automatically reply with NOMAX & avoid 
human intervention ... I do not want to change all spools to NOMAX just the 
one that CST900 writes to.
b) 99% of CST270 is garbage printout from treating additional description 
routing type-3 lines as if they are type-1 records ... we do not need the 
type-3 lines processed by this program.  I would like to have a FOD logical 
that is like FRTL03 if I only knew which program steps to override.  
We have approx 30,000 routings of type-1 & approx 400,000 of type-3.  We do 
make great use of the type-3 but there are some programs that do not need to 
be accessing them.
Even if this solved, we still do not exactly trust the CST270 math.

>  As I understand this process it performs two functions:
>  
>  !. updates actual cost records based upon the actuals posted in closed 
work 
> orders.
>  2. purges those closed work orders

There are some other complications ... do you have performance management PRF?
CST900 also checks the history files to find out if all the data is there to 
substantiate the notion that it is Ok to purge these orders ... if your shop 
order is older than the time period of history retention ... no history ... 
no purge until you force close the order.  There is a non-delete option that 
saves the cost history & just closes the order & CST900 will purge it 
irrespective of the history issue.

>  I do not believe that there is anything that happens as a result of 
running 
> this that needs to be tied to a financial month-end. could we run this as 
> often as weekly? would there be any advantage or disadvantage?

We do our fiscal end-month always on a Friday & through the weekend.
I believe that running CST900 on the Wednesday or Thursday preceeding 
end-month fiscal is good enough, and in fact that is what we do.

Our accountants get at a lot of data based on queries over the labor history 
file & I have warned them repeatedly about some stuff that I think they are 
using improperly, but query/400 written by people who know nothing about BPCS 
file structure carry more weight than programmer warnings.  

The cost data in the labor history file is irrespective of shop order open or 
close status & our people are generally interested in the activity on a month 
by month basis ... ie. what got posted during a fiscal month ... you just 
have to be careful what dates you use because no matter how much you tell 
people to get caught up with postings before fiscal, there will always be 
departments that do not get it & then on the first day of the new month they 
post a mountain of transactions that are dated the old fiscal month & this 
will go on for years before the auditors or accountants wake up to that fact, 
then they will fix it, and then the next employee turn over will go back to 
the old misunderstanding.

What I am getting at is end fiscal reports that look at data whose official 
date is in the month of the fiscal, which does not include the stuff that 
will get posted first day of new fiscal, or the stuff that got posted first 
day of old fiscal, because selection criteria on basis of fiscal month date 
range will always miss data that is posted outside of the fiscal cycle.
>  
>  chick doe
>  barton instrument systems  
>  

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

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