Re: ITH record purging -- BPCS-L

Lisa makes an excellent point.

Bottom line ... INV900 is a royal pain in the neck, so for some companies, it is worth considering the alternatives.

INV900 takes a LONG time to run, and you can't have users on when you running it. The users not understand this, not get the message no matter how much you say this. They are accustomed to use BPCS 400 any time they need it and not understand this special case once a month.

So we have to vary off a ton of work stations at a step of our check list, then later vary them all on again. Month before last we messed up. It was a team effort - one person did the vary on one day - another person did the vary off another day of a weekend - some got varied off not back on again - so Monday morning a bunch of people could not connect to BPCS/400 Managers not understand when I try to explain this

The length of time that INV900 takes is related to the volume of transactions being processed. We have just over one million from one year activity.

I ran it last Friday nite. The entire evening took me just over 10 hours, not counting the second backup that was running when I walked out of the building. 3 hours was INV900.

Last month there was a mistake in our EOM ... in essence a mis step was taken and we ran INV900 on an evening a few nights after EOM resulting in some totals in fiscal month sales and inventory will be a few days off ... better that than a whole month off.

In the case of that mistake, INV900 took less than one hour which seemed very suspicious.

I know of at least one bug in 405 CD ... if an IIM item master record has been deleted

While I said that I did not think one of the archiving products was worth getting JUST for ITH, if you have a lot of files that you have been keeping for 5 years, and now want to keep for 2 years, it might be simpler to go with an archiving product since it can clean up more than BPCS can.

When I do a count of what is in ITH by ITE transaction type, it is pretty obvious that there is a lot of content wen not want to save for a whole year.

Sounds to me Lisa's company could use an archiving product. He ... there is one I get a commission if you select it ... but you need to compare features with respect to resolving your specific needs. I had not realized you could have so much trouble JUST with ITH.

While this is probably the "right" solution, I would be cautious about how
long it will take this job to run.  We just found that some "bugs" in the
purge program (version 4.05, non-CD) were keeping a large number of things
from purging correctly.  (Some of these were program problems, and some
were data problems we had introduced when we converted to BPCS 8 years
ago.)  We have modified the program so that we do our purge separate from
the month end close, so that we can do it on the weekend following close,
and still have had to break our clean-up into many weekends, to get all the
data purged that should be.  If you have a lot of records to purge, and you
are running this with users off the system at month end (as we do), your
users might not be very happy with how long this takes!  I would suggest
doing this in a test environment first, to get an idea how long it will
take.

Lisa Abney
Sensient Flavors
Indianapolis, IN

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- Al Macintyre http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac Find BPCS Documentation Suppliers http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html BPCS/400 Computer Janitor at http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com/ Part time may get commission from some BPCS vendors for helping them ... I will now say in a post if the product I commenting on is also one potentially involved with this ... not that I have made anything from this yet.