Re: Customer Order Company Number -- BPCS-L

This has not yet happened to us, but we sometimes manage to get customer orders with price missing, or profit center wrong. We deal with this several ways: * Immediately before billing, we run queries off the BBL file for last minute inspection whether there is bad data going into Billing that perhaps can be fixed before it is propagated to Receivables and elsewhere * There are queries that are setup to run automatically containing various bad data (if any) with note on them who to give to (from computer room to right department) * There is a query many top managers like to run during the day showing grand total $ value from what has been shipped so far today, sorted by facility etc. ... those shipments with no price, or bogus facility, are kind of an obvious eyesore that they tend to ask about There are a couple places I would look first. 1. The process of picking confirming shipping gives access to most everything that is on the customer orders, including a lot of stuff that does not make a lot of sense to have the opportunity to change ... we have had people accidentally field exit through a field they did not mean to blank out, and not remember how to recover the prior contents (F5 works on many BPCS screens to refresh latest story there, including what was there before user started keying in changes) 2. Even if the users not normally expected to be on a certain screen, they can get there ... we have had people who want to change price, or description, or some thing, and not remember how to do that, and go exploring many screens trying to figure out where, and mess up fields where they have a misconception what that field is for.

Depending on how serious frequent this is, you could always log changes to the file, then write a program to compare log entries looking for changes in that field, and ignore all other changes, and also while you at it, verify what all programs are updating those files.

We are on BPCS 405 CD mixed mode ... according to our *OUTFILE analysis query, the following stuff updates customer orders ... we not using all of this stuff, and I not checking here what all these areas update in customer orders, I just getting list so you not overlook possible areas to check. This summarizes by application area, because approx 2,000 hits on the query detail list (duplications of program names vs. different logicals & different library list versions) * ALLOCATIONS * BACK ORDERING * BILLING ... regular and post ship billing, invoice reprinting * CONVERSION software - some old stuff we might not need any more * COPY order, quote, RMA, etc. ... where you take existing one and make a copy except for what you change different from original * CREDIT HOLD * CURRENCY conversions * CUSTOMER ORDER maintenance * DROP SHIPMENT management * FACILITY MOVE software that we had written for us ... when a decision is made to move a customer's parts to be made in another facility, a whole bunch of stuff in engineering and orders gets changed * FINAL ASSEMBLY stuff where shop orders can be launched from customer orders * FIX IT software that came with BPCS for use when on-order totals get scrambled * IN USE mass fix software that we wrote * PROMOTIONS and DEALS * PURGE software we wrote because of flaws in what came with BPCS * QUOTES maintenance * RESUPPLY order generation * RETURN MATERIAL AUTHORIZATION (RMA) updates * SHIPPING steps * UNIT OF MEASURE conversions


, you wrote:

Hi,
      We have had a sporadic problem where the company number on a customer
order is wiped out. This causes a LOT of problems, especially if it is not
caught until after it is billed. Since that time, we have caught 2 more
orders where the company number is blank. Has this happened to anyone? Any
ideas on where to look? The company # is on 2 of the header screens, but
they are not screens the order entry people go into.  We are on 6.02 mixed
mode. Thanks.

<===================================================>

Terri Harteau
Felker Brothers Corporation
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