Re: Newbie to BPCS -- BPCS-L

The topic of BPCS Documentation and help for people in positions like yours has come up before on this discussion list. After I found myself answering similar questions with repetitions of similar answers, I created a directory of the BPCS Documentation that I personally was aware of, on my personal Blog site. http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html

I have been too busy the last six months to keep this current, and I need to fix some links. But from what I do show there, you can find links to several key resources.

I have serious doubts that a newbie can accomplish in a few days what has been asked of you.

I think both you and your manager will want to aquire some of these BPCS manuals, unless the users of the various environments already have them. I suggest you get a mixture of the NEWBIE introductory materials and detail technical manuals in areas specific to your interests. There are classes in both the 400 and in BPCS, much more frequent in the 400 than in BPCS, but you can arrange, on relatively short notice, to have a BPCS consultant visit your site to provide education for your people.

It is not practical to successfully run a company on BPCS for very long without a tech support contract. You need to check on which tech support outfits you are using for each of the 3 locations, and when those contracts expire. Also the licenses with SSA. It may be less expensive to get advice from whatever outfit your company is ALREADY getting tech support from, than contracting with some new outfit. Ask your tech support outfit how the pricing would change if their contract was with your WHOLE COMPANY on one consistent version of BPCS.

The world of the AS/400 iSeries is VERY DIFFERENT from the world of UNIX or WINDOWS. Going from one world to another and grokking it well enough to make good decisions is not something that someone can do in a few days or even weeks. It can take months.

I agree with Roger and Dave. You need to simplify your reality, not add to the challenges. You need to get maximum benefit out of your investments, not increase your costs.

SSA supplies a conversion tool to get your data from one of their versions to another. That tool has serious bugs in it, because it does not enjoy the rapidity of customer feedback that the rest of SSA's offerings get. We did our BPCS version conversion using OTHER tools in the market place, so you have the additional complexity of understanding which conversion tools are right for you.

In our situation, we were combining 3 factories (4 data bases) that duplicated BPCS into a single consolidated data base environment. The SSA conversion tool was not suited to that kind of task. We found a combination of conversion tools that got the job done for us. Further discussion of that topic may belong in a separate thread. We came up with a revised number system so that apparently duplicated numbers from different facilities could in fact be combined into one data base.

In our case we had users with responsibilities to maintain data in all 4 data bases, and it was a royal pain ... we buy from one vendor shipped to 4 facilities, they send us a consolidated invoice but we pay them from the 4 facilities. We want one checking account but how do you reconcile checks paid off of the 4 facilities? It was a constant struggle. Going to one BPCS company for all our business simplified things no end for all corporate departments.

No matter how you do the conversion, you will need an added chunk of AS/400 capacity, because the conversion work space needs are larger than the old version plus the new reality combined. You have to look at that requirement and factor it into the overall budget and path.

Does your upper management have any interest in consolidating information from the 3 locations? Ours did. We had to add a LOT of software to combine information from the 4 data bases. If you have to do that from 3 different versions of BPCS, that has got to be a nightmare.

IBM has a REDBOOK that explains the 400 iSeries environment that BPCS runs in, from the perspective of a computer systems administrator. It is extremely technical.

You need to get at the documentation that came from SSA GT when the company aquired each version of BPCS and look for something called a NET CHANGE DOCUMENT which lists what exactly is the difference between one version and the next.

You might not be able to find it now, but there should have been a SIZING QUESTIONAIRRE used to identify the optimal hardware to run your company efficiently. If you can find it, there is a lot of insight there. If you cannot find it, people like Mitch can help you get another. But seeing the answers to the questions from earlier surveys can be extremely illuminating.

Other issues you will need to consider.

End user training ... Will you have corporate employees who will need to be working concurrently in the different environments? Will your IT department have employees who must service the needs of all the environments? Or will you just duplicate your staff so that each environment has its own collection of accountant, purchasing manager, customer service, etc. without benefit of corporate scaling? The issue is users getting confused over the different versions if they have to work in more than one.

In my experience, duplication of corporate personnel can be the most catastrophic cost of not using consistency of computer hardware and software.

Everything you change calls for retraining people who accustomed to the old ways of doing things. The bigger the volume of changes, the more cost for personnel relearning their jobs. I believe this is the biggest cost of a conversion to any company. You suddenly have all your work force take a major drop in productivity. There can be cash flow problems due to disruption in the processing of invoices and payments.

Much better to have a nightmare in the IT department for a few months or even a year, than to have a nightmare in the whole company.

Hardware and OS reliability and scalability. Unix/Windows lacks the computer security of iSeries/400, and has a much higher operating cost thanks to fragility issues. How often does your computer go down and have to be rebooted? How often do you have a hacker/virus hassle? If you follow IBM guidelines on the 400/iSeries the answer could be NEVER. While on other boxes, the answer could be EVERY ***** (swear word) ***** DAY. I have seen estimates that Unix/Windows administrators spend up to ONE THIRD of their time messing with the consequences of fragility issues that are NON EXISTANT on the 400/iSeries. I do not want to heavily get into this topic since it may be contrary to the list guidelines, but it is something you must consider.

SSA GT Pricing for Licenses ... it is much cheaper to get a box that is big enough to serve all corporate needs, one version of BPCS, and add on-software that will dramatically enhance the performance of BPCS (more on that in a later post thread since other people interested in that topic for reasons separate from your question). Every time you get another box upgrade, SSA GT License hits you again with unpredictable costs.

Versions prior to 405CD are not Y2K compliant except through modifications by some firm other than SSA GT. Was there any consistency between 3.7 and 4.0.05 in which methods was used? Your conversion may be from a very modified version, which means SSA conversion tool may not be a good marriage with the consequences of the modifications.

Communication Infrastructure ... In the USA we are accustomed to competing phone companies offering a great variety of services and scams, so we can pick and choose carefully between leased lines, VPN, etc. and struggle with issues of how often the communication line goes down, whether the line speed is good enough, and how come the phone bill keeps going up each month when we signed a contract to freeze the pricing.

But some countries do not have the same quality services. You may need to get a satelite dish at each company location so that your computer communications bypass the public phone services. This can be done. I have no experience in it but I know of several AS/400 companies that use this method to have uninterrupted telecommunications between all their offices.

Assuming you go with the 3 different locations all on BPCS 405 CD, there is the question of whether it makes more sense to put them all in the same environment, using facilities to uniquely identify each one, put them in 3 separate environments, or use LPAR.

Question ... do the 3 locations speak the same language (English, French, Spanish, whatever) and are they physically located pretty close to each other in geography? The answer to that question impacts the trade offs with respect to the OFFICIAL LANGUAGE of a BPCS installation, and taking BPCS down for backup, reorganization, etc. When a company works pretty much 1st shift, and all locations are within a few time zones of each other, it is not a big deal to take the system down during second shift for backup and reorganization.

Also consider the PATH that is optimal to maximizing the benefits as soon as possible with minimal hassles along the way.

Are the 3 locations now on 3 different AS/400? I think that migrating them AS IS to a single AS/400 first would be painless for the individual locations provided you get sufficient AS/400 capacity and communication speeds, plus consolidation of tech support staff on one box, more practical for IT efficiency, But this would be much more expensive from SSA Licensing perspective because you end up paying for the intermediate reality of non-405CD on new box before conversion to 405CD. You really need to get pricing from SSA for the different paths, since it is big money whichever way you go.

I think that converting ONE location to 405 CD THEN the OTHER location means less disruption to your personnel, and makes it practical to have a cadre of workers who get good at it in one conversion and then apply what they learned to the other. The whole task gets done with less personnel needed.

Dear All,
Greetings. I am basically newbie to BPCS and AS/400
environment. I need to find out a place where I can
understand the architecture of BPCS on AS/400. Would
you be able to suggest a best web site or a book that
is good for a starter like me.

I also have a requirement given by my manager where I
need to plan for system consolidation in the next few
days. We have 3 different BPCS environment with
versions 3.7, 4.0.0.5 and 4.5CD running on AS/400
platform at 3 different locations. I have been asked
to look into the following consolidation options:
1. Consolidate 3 BPCS instances running in 3 boxes
into one single box running AS/400 but still BPCS
running as 3 separate versions.
2. Consolidate 3 different versions of BPCS instances
in to 1 single version BPCS instance based on the
highest versions available in the location.
3. Migrate all 3 instances from AS/400 to Unix/Windows
platforms.

There are other options. One AS/400 or more boxes is a separate issue from one version of BPCS vs. three versions of BPCS. However, there are issues of optimizing your OS/400 that are related to your version of BPCS. If you running several copies of BPCS on the same AS/400, it is so much simpler if they are the SAME version.

Duplicating BPCS for 3 locations is not just the DATA. The SOFTWARE eats up a HUGE chunk of disk space in proportion to the data. Moving the 3 locations into a consolidated environment, thanks to facilities supported on 405 CD, will save you a big chunk of disk space.

It is possible to run the same BPCS data base on more than one AS/400 but this is an area that I am not experienced in knowing all the trade offs for. Basically you have an AS/400 at each site, they all talking to each other, the data is scattered across the 3 sites, the AS/400s can find the data for you. I do not believe that is efficient architecture for BPCS from perspectives of performance, cost, management.

I believe that one AS/400 box is the most economical approach because of SSA GT License pricing.

I would appreciate if you can share with me on your
professional expertise on the above options in terms
of costs vs benefits vs risks.
Thanks in advance.
Best regards,
Srikanth


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- 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