LANSA for the BPCS/400 Web connection -- BPCS-L

From Al Macintyre

Here's an interesting gem in the latest

 MIDRANGE Systems Headline Report for Thursday, August 3, 2000
             The AS/400 News and Information Source
                 http://www.midrangesystems.com
        Free subscription at http://lists.101com.com/mid

* LANSA INTRODUCES SMART/WEB FOR SSA BPCS CUSTOMERS
** By Jim Martin
Looking to capitalize on the popularity of Systems Software Associates' 
AS/400-based BPCS product line, LANSA, Inc. (Oak Brook, Ill.) has 
launched SMART/Web. This new e-commerce solution provides B2B Web-based 
functionality and Intranet capabilities to SSA's BPCS customers.
Read More: http://www.midrangesystems.com/breaknewsdisp.asp?ID=3084

I checked it out to see which versions are supported ... aha, our 405 CD is 
definitely supported, as well as almost the latest 6.01 ... no doubt LANSA 
will soon add 6.04 & 6.1 & others & check with major BPCS vendors to see 
whether support for other than SSA officially supported versions like 5.1 are 
worth their time.

Incidentally, I saw demos of LANSA at a local user group meeting a couple 
years ago & was very impressed, but unfortunately SEEING something & 
communicating it to the folks back at the office who I could not persuade to 
go to this or that seminar, is not one of my better skills.

I am surprised LANSA's product launch announcements went to a portion of the 
AS/400 community but not yet to the BPCS communities.  Perhaps in one of the 
future reports on a BPCS user convention, I shall learn that LANSA demos have 
been included in some of them.

I did not drill down sufficiently to see if it handles all the variations on 
web connections ... in our case we have BPCS/400 on one AS/400, with our web 
site hosted off of an NT server that is linked to our AS/400 by ethernet.  I 
had suggested a second AS/400 to do the hosting, but I was overruled.  
Different BPCS companies will have different configurations.

This deal supports placement of customer orders over the internet, so as to 
serve our customers outside our regular business hours, and possibly transfer 
some of the hassle of keying PO changes from our staff to our customer staff, 
but I might be concerned about tracking WHO DONE IT if staff at customer site 
do not have a good understanding of BPCS, accounts receivable inquiry, 
inventory inquiry, customer order inquiry, with internet security that is 
sensitive to the fact that BPCS CD is not natively easily e-secured.  I 
imagine this is all expandable to include other hot topics of various 
industries using BPCS, such as shipment history (date last shipment of parts 
from orders that are now closed) & engineering drawing revision verification 
of current story.

I recently suggested a new modification idea for Central ... Mac's AASN.
Where ASN Advance Ship Notice lists what we just launched at the customer, my 
proposed AASN Advance Advance Ship Notice would list what is supposed to go 
out in the next few days & where we are on manufacturing it & if there are 
any bottleneck issues & we have many other enhancements already implemented 
that I think would be just great if our customers could access them via the 
web.

I linked from the Midrange article to the Lansa site for more information 
http://www.lansa.com/ which had lots of other diverting information.

I will let someone else look at the pricing & see if this is something we can 
afford not to have.

Al Macintyre  ���
MIS Manager Green Screen Programmer & Computer Janitor of BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 
running on AS/400 V4R3 http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of 
Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical 
sub-assemblies
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