Re: OGS pricing -- BPCS-L

> Hi,

> SSA said me: No OGS, No KEY, when machine will eventually crash.

> What is your experience?

> Peter

Peter

Let me try to clarify KEY, LICENSE, TECH SUPPORT, BMRs, and BPCS EDUCATION.
Hopefully people will not find my presentation to be talking down
insulting, as I try to spell out the basics of what should be known to the
management of every BPCS installation.

Sometimes a person you talk with does not understand all the nuances, or
there is some misconception regarding what you are asking about.

You need the KEY to run BPCS on the machine.  So long as you do not upgrade
to a different machine, and so long as you have KEY authorizing BPCS, BPCS
should run fine on that machine.  But sooner or later, a company wants to
replace an old machine with state-of-art.  This may be every 3-7 years
depending on financial ability, and desire, to stay current, and depending
on how much you can upgrade with better processors, and other add
ons.   There will come a time when your company wishes to replace the
AS/400 with the next generation iSeries.  You back up 100% on the old
machine, with allowance for differences between the box OS/400 settings,
then load the tape to the new machine, and everything is there, except BPCS
will not run for security reasons, until you get the KEY for the new
machine, which you have to get from SSA,

The KEY is to assure SSA that only companies that are LICENSED to operate
BPCS do in fact run BPCS on their machines.

That LICENSE is based on how much usage you get out of BPCS, such as how
many USERS on the machine with access to BPCS.  From time to time, SSA may
conduct an AUDIT to make sure that your number of USERS is no larger than
the number specified by the LICENSE.  You would be advised to run your own
internal audit more often than SSA does, to make sure there are no
surprises.  As a result of our audit, we traded in our LICENSE for a
CHEAPER one that had less USERS.  If SSA had not shaken the management tree
to do the audit, it is quite possible that my management would still be
asleep on the topic of the availability of a cheaper LICENSE.

I had advised against this, because I thought it was more expensive to
periodically up and down number users size of license, but management
thought that it would be a few years before they would need a larger
license and in the mean time this was another way to save money.

At some point in the future, your company may want to upgrade to a newer
version of BPCS.  Depending on what kinds of contracts you had with SSA,
this can be a relatively straightforward conversion, or extremely painful
both financially, and in the hassles to get the job done.

You need TECH SUPPORT because BPCS is a complex ERP with some bugs, lots of
users who can have misconceptions, mistakes and mishaps happen, and
invariably people want modifications.  Sooner or later, something will go
wrong, that you cannot fix in house, and which is intolerable to let it
continue without being fixed.

If your company is using a modified version of BPCS, you could run into
trouble getting SSA tech support from OSG, because they could argue that
the reason it broke is because of a bug in the modifications.  Now SSA can
support modified BPCS, and can do modifications for your company, but not
through OSG.

SSA does not support 100% of all versions of BPCS that have ever existed in
the whole history of SSA.  If you are on an older version of BPCS, sooner
or later that version drops out of the window of all support options
offered by OSG.

You can get tech support from SSA (they call it OSG), or from any one of a
large number of third party BPCS professional companies.  I do not know all
the names of the companies out there that offer BPCS tech support.  I know
several.  They offer mixtures of services, and pricing packages, that are
not the same mixture that OSG has.  If you have in-house people who are
fairly knowledgeable about the machine and about BPCS and about
programming, and so forth, then you probably do not need quite as much TECH
SUPPORT as a company that has little or none of the above.

You can have a tech support contract in which if you never call them for
help, they will never bill you, but if you do call them, you pay over a
hundred dollars an hour for the time of the technician, however long it
takes to fix the problem.  SSA does not offer this.

You can have tech support in which a technician dials into your machine to
figure out what you cannot figure out yourself.  We have a menu option to
turn on the ECS line so it is ready for tech support to call ... we send
them voice mail or e-mail with brief summary of the problem, then they dial
into our machine and fix it, then we get a bill for a few hundred dollars.

You can pay an astronomical sum of money, and get virtually unlimited
support, in which a lot of time is wasted with each call for help, because
you have to explain to the TECH SUPPORT contacts an enormous amount of
information about your company, your situation, the current problem, with
every call on the same problem.

You can find a specific bug in a BPCS program, that has specific
undesirable effects, that you want fixed, and they will give you an
arguement that it is supposed to work that way.

SSA does find bugs and fixes them, and makes them available to customers as
BMRs.
SSA lists a directory of BMR solutions using OSG.  If you have the right
kind of TECH SUPPORT contract with SSA, you can search OSG to see if there
is a BMR to fix a problem you been having, then get a copy of that BMR, or
you can search OSG to see what fixes are in the pipeline for programs that
are important to your company to be working better.

If your only dealings with SSA are to have the KEY and the LICENSE, in
which you are getting your TECH SUPPORT from some other outfit, then you
can't get the BMRs, unless you make individual financial arrangements with
SSA to get a copy of some BMR that you want.  You could also ask the TECH
SUPPORT place, that you are using, to modify your version of BPCS to
accomplish the same end goal that is the purpose of the BMR.

If your BPCS has been modified, there may be some conflicts between the
modifications and some BMRs.

Now your people are also going to need continuing education in BPCS which
they can get from a variety of sources, depending on your budget and
corporate philosophy.

You can send a bunch of people to BPCS UNIVERSITY CAMPUS for a week or so
for intensive education.  You can have the BPCS PROFESSOR come and teach to
your people at YOUR FACILITY.  I think it is much cheaper to pay air fare
and hotel for ONE professor, than for a big crew of your people going the
other way.  You can purchase and study BPCS FOR DUMMIES (it is not called
that of course).  You can attend BPCS CONVENTIONS and USER GROUP
SEMINARS.  You can subscribe to BPCS newsletters, and study archives of
great sources of continuing BPCS education, with the leader being BPCS_L.


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