Re: Year-End Woes... -- BPCS-L

Nick

You need to schedule some BPCS education for yourself ASAP.  
Several places offer classes.  Your employer should pay for them.
You need this because any ERP is complex & this one's on-line documentation 
is very poorly cross-indexed.  It is extremely easy to mess things up when 
you have only partial knowlege of how the systems are inter-related.  For 
example, no one should make any changes in SYS800 without first thoroughly 
studying the documentation on the rules involved & making sure everyone who 
will be affected is fully aware of what is going down.

If your employer is unwilling to send you off to one of the BPCS 
Universities, then the most economical approach is for you to get BPCS 
reference manuals to supplement was is available on-line, then make an effort 
to make it to one of the BPCS conventions & user conferences.

UPI has a series of manuals aimed at people who manage particular collections 
of applications, explaining how the system is supposed to work & all the 
tasks that ought to be run to get the job done right.  These are based on 
UPI's classes.

DSL has a Programmer Reference Manual that charts what all the special codes 
mean in the various files & how the software is interlinked - a navigation 
guide for the technically oriented.

IBM has a Redbook specifically on optimizing AS/400 performance for BPCS.

If you are a BPCS security officer, you ought to be able to get to menu DOC & 
check out what passes for BPCS on-line documentation.  I think SSA is nuts 
for making this accessible only to high security MIS users - it should be 
easy for any user to access ... I have made it easy for my users by mucking 
with security rules & offering a short cut menu.  For a programmer, once you 
see where this is stored, PDM is an easier way in.

You need to check what place is the provider of BPCS tech support for the 
shop you just took over & it it is the same place as last year.  The guy who 
fixed the problem might have been doing exactly what the tech support place 
told him to do & they can tell you the same things.

You need to check whether there is any internal documentation on problem 
solving.
At our shop we experience certain problems repeatedly, so we have an indexed 
document of how to cope the next time it happens, because we cannot expect 
people to remember the right stuff to do when it is 2 months between same 
incidents.

You also need to figure out if you can make contact with the brains that 
drained away.  I have found in the past when I was in a new job, some contact 
with the former person now doing my new job was wonderful in explaining some 
mysteries & also I was able to help the person now doing my old job.  I 
consider this to be part of professional courtesy.  Whatever our differences 
with the fiormer employer that led to parting company, we should help our 
fellow practicioners.

As to your immediate problem, you are on V6 which means you do not have 
direct access to the source code like we on V4 do.  The software is generated 
by something called AS/Set.  A programmer needs to know how to navigate that 
& it can take a class, just like in any other HLL.

In some ways V4 is similar to V6 & in other ways it is alien & the V6 people 
know the differences.  Thus any guidance I can give, from what I have figured 
out from studying the source code, may not be relevant.

On V4, the documents involved in shipping are generated by one humongous 
ORD570 or ORD590 or something like that program ... if I print out the source 
code it is OVER 1,000 pages long & every other line is soft code, meaning you 
have to look up some place else to see what is substituted at execution time. 
 This software in turn calls a dozen other programs of similar sizes.  
Fortunately, the printing of the shipping documents themselves are very small 
easily modified programs such that without messing with the flow of the 
logic, we can tailor what is to print to meet our needs.

The data that prints on shipping documents comes from a combination of what 
is in the customer orders and a rather cumbersome series of steps taken by 
people in the shipping department.  At Central, most of our shipping document 
errors are caused by humans doing steps in the wrong sequence.  For example, 
some of the steps can be sent to the JOBQ & you have to wait until those 
steps go to a conclusion before you do next steps.  If the JOBQ normally gets 
the job done really fast, some users, who do not understand multi-processing 
& multi-user networks, can get in the habit of allowing enough time for a job 
to get done, then going on to the next step, which mans that when the JOBQ 
gets backed up, user error messes up the final output.

This is why our instructions to our shippers are to do EVERYTHING on-line & 
we have toyed with notion of a separate JOBQ just for their stuff.

We also have cases of poorly trained shipping people.  They found out some 
stuff by experimentation, then taught other people the wrong way.  I had a 
modification request to fix the shipper documents such that they did not need 
to transcribe shipper address in there.  Come to find out that instead of 
doing the flow of CREATING a shipping document, then modifying it, they were 
starting with the modifying of a non-existant document, which meant they had 
to key in everything that automatically goes in when the first step is to 
create one.

If you have someone doing steps in the wrong sequence, or a team of people 
who collectively are doing their steps in the wrong order, that could create 
shipping documents with missing addresses.  We have a manual for our shippers 
that spells out step by step, with example screen prints, what they have to 
do.  It is not a simple straightforward process like it was on our BPCS 
before AS400.

I can't help you with EDI ... we abandoned ours several years ago.

There is also extensive archives of this discussion group, with search engine 
for where topics have come up in the past that can be very helpful.

http://archive.midrange.com/bpcs-l/index.htm

When your topic of interest is not specific to BPCS, you can go to the main 
archive & do a SEARCH ALL.  One thing I do not know, & need to find out is, 
if I can steer co-workers who are not subscribing to BPCS-L to the archives & 
have the search engine work for people who are not involved in the list that 
has the answers.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
AS/400 Data Manager & Programmer for BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 mixed mode (twinax 
interactive & batch) @ http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of 
Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical 
sub-assemblies - fax # 812-424-6838

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