Re: Customer Orders in Use -- BPCS-L

Oops ... I mis stated myself in an idea for a modification / enhancement, in the aftermath of some more frustration with this scenario.

My vision is two fields tied to ECH One means who is updating the order most recently. Two means PREVIOUS person to update it. When the IN USE flag is reset, the previous content of latest user would get moved to the previous field and the current user is populated in the most recent person update. Perhaps if the last update person is same as current user, no changes.

This way people can see who else has been changing specific customer orders, when conflict due to in-use BY WHOM. and improve ability to diagnose when in use gets seton and never off.

Something for the suggestion box - future enhancements modifications idea - I am thinking aloud how my profession might do a better job of responding to a hassle that occurs too often.

I wish that when SSA GT designed this application, they had gone an extra inch and created a field = NAME of last USER to mess with this order, which would get plugged in when a person access throws ON the IN USE flag, so that when someone else cannot access because the order is in use, the message would go the extra inch of saying BY WHOM. Perhaps also another field with NAME of last USER to finish updating the order, that would get plugged in when the software gets to the point of removing the IN USE flag. This is something that would show on the HEADER screen of the order, and when the PREVIOUS person to be updating this order is OTHER than the person NOW updating it, the name would show in BOLD. In theory, normally the only time we should have two different people updating the same customer order is when one is in customer service and the other is in shipping/billing a partial shipment. But we have had cases of too many cooks.

Now in our situation apparently some update run goes haywire and we get bunches of orders in use when in fact no one is in them. I have created software and instructions how to reset all the flags (which I sometimes run in the evening after everyone is off the system); how to reset a flag on one order; how to get a list of orders whose in-use flags are on; but what is really needed that I do not have (we are 405 CD) is something superior to GO CMDLCK that can definitively tell us what customer orders are in use right now by whom, and which of the in use flags are bogus. This is so when we have a problem in the middle of day, do not have to kick everyone off orders to do a safe fix, or delay resolution until our off-hours.

I suspect a variation on DISPLAY ACTIVE BPCS JOBS might be able to do that. http://www.precosis.com.au/rv1.htm Current state of that art is like WRKACTJOB but instead of showing BPCSMENU it shows the actual program where each user is in their stack, and you can sort on that so as to show all the users in ORD stuff right now, and perhaps view their screens to see which order those are. This might be a bit tedious when lots of users.

Another possibility might be to use Stitch In Time http://www.unbeatenpathintl.com/stitch_in_time.htm to track, any time someone action causes in-use flag reset, capture who, program used, date time stamp, order # then when we get into situation of a bunch of customer orders in use, and it a mystery how they got that way, we can see what program user did it. A related inquiry could select cases where there are mismatches in-use went on, did not go off ... if we believe the data, these are the folks updating which orders right now in use went on by one person, went off by another person (fixes), and we can see the pattern of what is doing the bombing

There may be other relevant tools out there to help with this scenario, with less hassle.
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Al Macintyre

- Al Macintyre http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac BPCS/400 Computer Janitor at http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com/ Find BPCS Documentation Suppliers http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html