Re: APICS comparison of ERP Software -- BPCS-L

This weekend I watched some TV coverage of IBM financial report, interested 
to see what got mentioned & omitted (see Midrange_L thread on "Televison 
Appearance").  CNET.COM did talk about current tech stock earnings, and 
shared my opinion that a company with fantastic profits can be trashed on 
Wall Street if the profits do not measure up to analyst expectations, jaded 
by dot com meteoric rates of rise & fall, but CNET.COM did not mention IBM.  

I thought the segment on using Touch Screen for voting indicated outrageous 
pricing compared to AS/400 standards for multi-lingual productivity.  Lot of 
interesting stories, such as the link to eye cancer with cellular telephone 
usage, term "crony" combined with "e-marketing", verifying wisdom I have seen 
elsewhere that Bush election will have zero effect on break up of Microsoft, 
software to help a company manage energy consumption based on the notion that 
when overall demand is less, utility companies charge lower rates, so perhaps 
a company can adjust hours of equipment usage to get better utility rates.

They heavily advertised the notion that for companies interested in selecting 
an ERP, an important resource is Enterprise.CNET.Com which has 800 different 
ERPs with unbiased information about how they compare to each other.  I 
thought to check it out to see if BPCS included & if this place was part of 
the conspiracy I think I see to blackball certain IBM systems from these 
alleged overall comparisons.

CNET's Search Engine for ERP turned up zero hits for BPCS, SSA, or SSAX, but 
did find stuff on IBM.  This substantiates my allegation that one of the most 
popular ERP in the world is black listed because it runs on one of the most 
popular big business computer systems in the world.

There were 51 reports & analysis on IBM, such as from the META Group.
There were 45 product reviews on IBM, many from Gartner
There were 217 relevant product names, with OS/2 Warp Server at the head of 
the list, which I thought IBM had withdrawn some time ago, followed by an NT 
based solution, then OS/390 with 92% User Rating (pretty good by CNET 
standards but not good enough by those of IBM & 400 loyalists), with Gartner 
used as primary source of info on IBM & ERPs that run on IBM platforms

OS/400 search got 1 report (enterprise storage) 1 product review (a 
competitor of UDB/400 that runs on OS/400 with no mention in thr review of 
the notion that doing something like this is a negative productivity 
investment, like buying a brand new state of art PC & using it exclusively 
for old DOS software products) and 9 matching products.

I was discouraged from continuing by printer problems ... I had to reboot my 
PC many times to clear up the printer communication problems caused by trying 
to print from the CNET.com Enterprise page, but I did take the time to insert 
my positive opinion on OS/400 which will be added to their collection in 2-4 
business days.

This is the kind of internet resource that ought to be telling mid sized 
companies about mid sized solutions, but they are totally ignorant about the 
AS/400's power & advantages, let alone logical ERP to be running on it.  Is 
this deliberate or what?

It seems to me that IBM & OS/400 only show up on the lists when some product 
being reviewed because it runs on Linux or Unix or NT happens to include the 
factoid that it also runs on OS/400.

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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