BPCS Documentation from ASAP BPCSPros.com -- BPCS-L

Vendor reply:

If you require extensive BPCS documentation, manuals, or even training
classes on BPCS you may contact Advanced Systems and Products (ASAP).

Sincerely,
Paul Reed
Advanced Systems and Products (ASAP)
www.BPCSPros.com
PR@xxxxxxxxxxxx
877 USE-ASAP


-----Original Message-----
From: bpcs-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bpcs-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Al Mac
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 4:01 PM
To: SSA's BPCS ERP System
Subject: Re: Newbie to BPCS

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
_______________________________________________
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