Re: Multiple Plants / AS400s -- BPCS-L

There are several topics here.
1. Multiple facilities 400 boxes management.
2. Multiple facilities BPCS data management.
3. Multiple languages and cultures, data presentation friendly to the
people there.

For topic one, this list is probably not your best source of guidance.  You
want to look at other lists hosted by midrange.com and by the various 400
magazines.  I believe iSeries network has a forum just on System
Administration issues like propagating OS4 upgrades to sites that have no
IT personnel.  Supporting 400 boxes in other countries, whose phone systems
are a joke, came up in our local 400 user group, in which a solution was to
get a private satellite dish and send the 400 communication handshakes that
way, totally bypassing ma bell.

For topic two, you might seek contact with Rob Dekko who is active on
midrange-L.  They have 40 some manufacturing divisions, in which each one
uses a different BPCS environment.  We now have all our factories in one
environment, using 405 CD facilities to keep separate what's what, but
prior to that we were on a version of BPCS in which we had to keep each
factory on a separate data base, and had to do a ton of modifications to
keep them in sync with each other.  It was a clerical nightmare.  I suspect
in the future, there will be a market for EDI delivery of updates.  One
environment might have a master list of customer #s, item #s, etc. which
would be used for validation before assigning a new #, then there would be
a mechanism to send copies of the setup particulars to whichever
environments or 400 boxes need copies.

For topic three, check BPCS_L archives.  We have had some lively
discussions about presenting BPCS data in the languages of the natives
wherever they may be, and recently an IBM CE told me about a large 400 with
partitions for each of several South American countries in which the CE
only knew English but the 400 error messages at the host were in the
language of the partition.
-
Al Macintyre (macwheel99@sigecom.net via Eudora)

>The other day I was approached regarding a problem that appears to be a
>growing issue in the "midrange marketplace", that being finding a way to
>keep multiple AS/400 (iSeries) boxes current with each other. With an
>increasing number of companies opening plants in Mexico and China (as
>well as other places) this appears to be an increasingly prevalent
>problem. How many of you are using multiple AS400's? How do you handle
>the issue of like item numbers, customer master lists, etc? If anyone
>has any questions about how we handled this, they can email me directly
>at fgeric@agility-inc.com. We can propagate BPCS as well as any other
>AS400 data across multiple iSeries boxes.
>Thanks,
>Frank

-
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