Re: EWR data in file ... ??? ...

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

Sometimes user session gets disrupted.
This is more often true with PC than with Twinax.

Users only call MIS if they cannot get their work to work.
If the program seems to be working Ok, they just get on with it.

>From user perspective everything is running fine, so they just get on with
their job.
>From BPCS perspective some data may be messed up, which will come back to
haunt us the next time we try to work with those orders, items, whatever it
was we were doing on that work station when the disruption occurred.
When data is messed up, we seldom know what caused it to be messed up.

Thus, the combination of how BPCS handles stuff, human nature, and the
fragility of PC Windows, means that we have a series of incidents that create
little time bombs waiting to go off the next time someone is on the same work
station working with the same kind of data.

I wrote a program to dump to a report all the areas where BPCS stores these
work areas, in which when there is a change in the values within an
application, that change is flagged.  Invariably this is an instance where
that workstation data area needs to be reset.

A related topic is which of these files is supposed to be empty of records
when the day's order changes & shipping & billing is completed.

I run a query that lists all orders that have their IN-USE flag locked.

It is sometimes simpler to find all the stuff that is an exception to the
rules, than to track down how it got that way.

I have no idea how EW* files get populated.
We have a ton of them & they are all empty.

Something I think we are doing wrong is failing to adequately communicate to
people to STAY OUT OF WHAT when other things are running.

For example, our Billing Clerk sends a message
"Everyone please stay out of Customer Order Updating until I get the Billing
done, which will only take a few minutes."
Well Billing fails to do 2 invoices, because

a) Someone in the customer service department left their screen in the middle
of an order when they had to leave their desk, so they never even saw the
billing message & that order happened to be one being shipped today.

b) Someone in a shipping department was looking at what needed to be done
tomorrow & it so happened that there was an item being shipped 2 days in
succession & the program that was convenient for that person to use was an
update program in which they were not doing any updates, so they thought that
because they were in there for inquiry purposes, it did not count.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)