Re: Purging BPCS Files of Items not in IIM

[Al Mac <macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> We have BPCS files that contain records that have no matching Item in the
> Item Master (IIM) file.  Is it safe to delete these items from other BPCS
> files without any kind of verification?  Thanks for the advice in advance!
This is something I been working on, and not just IIM file.
You need to be familiar enough with BPCS of your version to see what is
going on, like notes files with pointers to originals that aint there any more.
In my case, cleaning out IIM file is the LAST file I hit after cleaning out
stuff that affects costs and planning for example, then the actual cost
planning files.
I not clean out the records if there been ANY activity on them recently.
You also have to be careful with new records ... a new record can show date
of last activity being NONE, so different dates used to eliminate from
confusion.

BPCS is good at adding records for a growing business.
It is not good for handling turn-over of business where there are
engineering changes, model line changes, turn over of customers.
Some files purge themselves more or less automatically within the course of
monthly and annual operations, while others accumulate data to infinity.
I wrote a program to take an IBM dump of 400 file statistics then look at
each file with SQL to get the oldest date there, and put the whole thing in
chart format so we could see .... Ok if we eliminate all the records more
than 2 years old from this file we will save X disk space, so now I have a
bunch of tiny programs we run annual or more often to do that with various
files.
This was after I had a chat with each department ... how long do you need
to keep shipping history ESH ESL records anyway, or whatever the case may be.
My analysis found there was more disk space wasted from duplicate software
than from dead records in the files.
You can get the whole package written for you from some consultant.
Go to the UPI web site and check out BPCS LITE
http://www.unbeatenpathintl.com/bellslite.html


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Al Macintyre (macwheel99@sigecom.net via Eudora)
Al's diary http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/
Cure cancer. http://members.ud.com/about/