Re: Invoice Promotion problem -- BPCS-L

We are on BPCS 405 CD.  We do not use PRO.

We found a problem in which the rounding was occasionally randomly
incorrect on invoices, no apparent pattern which invoices, customers,
orders, etc.  Basically the last digit of price or totals could be off by
one. Most invoices correct.  It was like one invoice in 20 that was
off.  Apparently it had been going on for some time without being noticed,
then accounting fixing the ones they saw, through billing adjustments,
before I was asked how could this happen.

We determined that the problem was that several BPCS programs were
multiplying the largest possible size fields of RPG 30 positions long with
9 decimal, which the IBM RPG manual says can produce unexpected incorrect
values, if inadequate provision is made for work fields, and that the
highest probability for error was in multiplying extreme values, so for
example, multiple zero times one and the result is plus or minus 0.001 when
all the fields involved at 30 positions long with 9 decimal.

At the time that we discovered this, we were still on OSG.  We identified
the pages in the RPG manual that explains this, the lines of code in BIL522
BIL622 CST600 CST900 and some other programs, I forget now which, that were
in violation of the RPG manual, and got nowhere with SSA (I suspect because
the tech support person put on the case was not a programmer, so the IBM
manual carried no weight with them), so we modified the programs where we
were getting the "extreme" values (unit of measure conversion), to fix the
problem so Billing would calculate correctly.

The problem in costing was systemic(astronomical volume of math routines
that way).  Our solution was to develop some cost cleanup software to
periodically clean up the mess caused by the rounding problem.  It seems to
me that CST900 is generating garbage with a much higher intensity than
CST600 but it is only a few new glitches per run.  This is not a big problem.

This is a strange one, perhaps you all can help.

We have a customer to whom we give a 0.25% "spoilage allowance" off of
each invoice.  This is entered as a discount in PRO110, and seems to
work fine as far as the AR, ORD, and BIL are concerned, with one minor
exception.

The INVOICE prints with an incorrect discount.  It hits AR and the GL
properly, and REPRINTS properly, but the first print is not correct.  We
did not find this until they started over-paying the invoices.

If by chance one of you has seen this before, please let me know how
you dealt with it.  In the alternative, if any of you can tell me in
what program such a thing could happen, I would appreciate it.

Thanks!
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_______________________________________________

Al Macintyre
BPCS/400 Computer Janitor at http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com/
Al at home http://ryze.org/view.php?who=Al9Mac
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