Re: Let us go ahead with life -

Ideally we all have been periodically sending in suggestions to SSA, & 
continue to do so with SSA GT, periodic thoughtful suggestions regarding how 
we think the product can & should be improved as their time permits.

Unfortunately & I plead guilty to this charge, we are so buried in our own 
interests & thinking with the mind set of Help Line & OSG as places to go 
when we are in TROUBLE & needing a computer fix, that we easily can neglect 
efforts to suggest to our ERP provider & the wonderful consultants who help 
out here with tips & solutions various things that we think would enhance the 
product.

So for those of us who have been neglecting this duty of a loyal customer, we 
should be thinking ahead to helping with V9, since I imagine the programming 
for V8 is about done & they are now in quality assurance testing & tweaking 
the code to fix any trivial points they overlooked & for all we know a few 
select customers are now in confidential beta testing.

Of course many ideas are so obvious that we cannot be the first to suggest 
this & for all we know there are a ton of 3rd party solutions already out 
there to do whatever we dreaming of.

For example

I know there are a ton of ways from several computer vendors to put an e-face 
on legacy-BPCS so that our customers & other supply chain interests can 
connect to our BPCS data that is relevant to them.

I have seen tips from WOW & TR on how to color code spread sheets so that 
data that falls outside some reasonable ranges in a sea of numbers is 
highlighted & I suspect some people are already doing this sort of thing with 
ERP exception reports.  I think that ultimately BPCS data ought to go into 
graphical formats that are color coded.  A picture is worth a thousand words, 
but I think that sometimes we have a million numbers that our users somehow 
are expected to make sense of.

I know that there are add-ons available for just about every BPCS application 
imaginable, but it can be burdensome to research what the choices are since 
every supplier seems to use different interfaces to tell us what they have.

I would like a directory, like one of the AS/400 search engines, or perhaps 
in the new standard UDDI format, in which we could look up some BPCS 
sub-topic interest area & see a listing of outfits that offer services for 
that, with links to their web sites for more detail.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/10/13/001013hnuddi.xml?1013frpm 
for info on UDDI

Alister William Macintyre 
Computer Data Janitor etc. of BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 on 400 model 170 OS4 V4R3 
(forerunner to IBM e-Server i-Series 400)  @ http://www.cen-elec.com Central 
Industries of Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and 
electrical sub-assemblies

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