Re: INV900 - Month End -- BPCS-L

We also on 405 CD.

We have approx 1 million records in our ITH.
When I have totalled them by ITE code, there have been some surprises.
We have a lot of factory history which makes sense, but a monstrous volume
of # in history ... every time someone does CST100, which we have a lot of,
it puts this stuff into the history which is unreadable.
Seems to me that changing the rules impacted by CST600 and CST900 has much
bigger impact on our costs than CST100, but there is no history of those
rule changes that can be interrogated in any intelligible fashion.

We now store our ITH inventory history for 1 year.
We have in past experimented in keeping that data for less time.
This has had bad results.
Worst was fact that shop orders need access to ITH before they can close
properly.
So if you have shop order that for some reason is open a few months, and
inventory reported against it, and the inventory purged before the shop
order is purged, then BPCS cannot purge that shop order.

INV900 takes about 3 hours for us.
A very early step in our EOM is to do a SAVE 21 ... everything ... and that
takes a little over an hour.
Seems to me the computer time for everything other than the backup and
INV900 is like 2 hours.
The TIME is in looking at the data to decide if it is correct enough to
move on to the next step.

I figure 1/2 hour of our 3 hours of INV900 is due to the fact that we are
using up the OLD Tapes on stuff that not need the more expensive NEW
technology tapes in terms of content volume, but these OLD Tapes are
considerably slower than the new ones, because they do not have the dual
track technology.  That excess tape movement time means that INV900 cannot
end until the tape drive is finished doing its thing.  If we switched to
the more expensive tapes for INV900, it would shave some time off the total
run time.  The question is whether that balance is justifiable.  In my mind
it is not, but discussions like this are useful in evaluating what all the
elements are in why INV900 takes so long.  Certainly it might be useful for
the accounting department, that often decides about which type of tape to
buy on basis of expense, what the impact is on the run time for jobs they
need that use whichever kind of tape.

I have asked for more of the expensive tapes because I am not comfortable
with our current total backup policy, and been shot down.  If we cannot
justify more of the NEW tapes for a better backup policy, then I not see
justifying them to save 1/2 hour a month in perpetuity on EOM.  However,
perhaps we need to go pricing smaller volume tapes.

A big question is if we really do need a copy on tape of the deleted records.
They are in the YTH file.

A problem we have had is that every 8-16 months or so we have something go
wrong with the tape or the tape drive that messes up our INV900, and
recovering from that is a royal nightmare.  So there has been an interest
in divorcing the tape operations from the INV900 run.

Send the data that is to go to tape to some disk file, then after the EOM
is all done, and we no longer need to be dedicated, send that data from
disk to tape.

Another thing is that the day before, or a couple days before the EOM, I do
some support functions to help the EOM run more smoothly.

SYS120 total BPCS reorganization ... this takes about 45 minutes dedicated
BPCS.
I now run it twice a week because it makes the difference between CST900
taking 2-3 hours and taking 5-7 hours.
OS/400 re-IPL ... this takes about 15 minutes dedicated 400.  We now do it
once a month, a day or two before EOM.

I have in recent months been doing analysis of what we have in BPCS that we
do not need.
This has resulted in a reduction of disk space from 85% consumption to 72%
consumption.
A chunk of that was item master routings BOM and related files on parts we
have not made in several years, and we able to determine the customers will
never want again (model changes, revision changes and so forth).  When you
get rid of something from your data base that you no longer need, it has
performance benefits all over the place, let alone safety stock tied up in
raw materials needed for BOM for customer stuff that we will never again be
making.


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Al Macintyre (macwheel99@sigecom.net via Eudora)