Re: Pick Slip Release (ORD550) not available; Pick Slips are Printing -- BPCS-L

Your situation is virtually identical to what I responded to on the last thread. Except with the picking going haywire, you could also have a problem with IN-USE flags.

Jenny Carr company was doing post ship billing, and something did not go to a proper conclusion. Kylea White company was doing shipping picking, and something did not go to a proper conclusion.

How you deal with this is conceptually the same actions ... just different options, work members. BPCS keeps track of where you are in the middle of a series of steps by using members and data areas that are named after the work session involved. This can get messed up many ways.

For us it typically happens when we have people who do not understand the realities of a multi-user system ... they send something to printer or JOBQ and expect instantaneous service, and when do not get it, try to do the same option again, thinking something went wrong with their PC ... or they do not understand that what BPCS is doing is a lot more than what they are seeing on the screen ... they lose connection to host in middle of BPCS updating something, so the data involved is scrambled, but if they are able to reconnect and continue doing their work, they forget to tell IT that there was some problem.

We also have people who lose track of which session they using for what thread. You supposed to use the same session to do steps 1 2 3 4 5 6 etc. in sequence. But they get interrupted ... they remember they finished step 2, with 3 next to do, but they not remember which session this was at, and do not know the difference, and pretty soon we now have more than one session messed up.

I have suggested photocopying a check list of steps, in which you write on the working copy the identity of the session side that you are using for this, in case you get interrupted.

Once human error or disconnection gets BPCS into the error condition, the circumstances that caused the error may have gone away, but the error condition remains hanging.

Some variation on this happens to us all the time. Also we get wrong order lines picked and we have collectively forgotten how to unpick them. Also I use DFU all the time when a shipment goes out before the price goes into the order. By fixing the BBL record, we get the Receivables and General Ledger on track.

Look at the screen shot that I gave Jenny. In your case you would select BPCS Function 6 for which data area to reset ... the one that manages Customer Order Picking.

You ought to read the BPCSDOC on this, because the process is not intuitively obvious ... there are several steps that have to be done, and it is possible that the people are missing some steps, if they are new to this.

It is possible to have BPCS source code without having it in the same library as the execution code. When BPCS 405 CD was purchased, it should have come with the source code. Ours is in library BPCS405CDS (letter S on end for SOURCE) which is NOT in the standard BPCS library list.

Query/400 came free on our OS/400 ... you might check with your IBM Business Partner to find out why it is not on the box ... a logical explanation could be: * It was never loaded because folks did not know what it could be used for * It was never loaded because the box has a disk space shortage * It was loaded but no one knows that it is there ... you can test this notion from command line via RUNQRY *N ECH or some other file name ... this gets you a dump to screen of contents of that file, in query/400 format ... alternatively instead of enter key, do F4 then on the bottom line change to *YES and you get a selection screen for which records to view

Hi all,

I have an issue where a company has recently switched from Post Ship
Billing to Entering and picking the orders etc etc.  Each morning they
complain to me that they can not get into Pick Slip Release as a message
states "Pick Slip Release (ORD550) not available; Pick Slips are Printing".
They are currently on an old 4.05 version of BPCS.

I checked the job queues and job logs and nothing seems to be stuck and
nothing seems to have fallen over - no jobs running.

Does anyone have any idea why the users would be getting this error message
when attempting to run this option.  The users tell me that when they get
the message they will go to another session and select the option and it
will work - but the next time they go to that session they get the message
again.  Any suggestions???

Even if you could tell me how to unlock the entries that would be great.

There is no source or query tools on their AS/400 so things are a little
limited (thank goodness for DFU).

Note:  They use a product called NewLook (GUI screen) that sits over the
top of BPCS

Regards,


Kylea White
Technical Consultant
KAZ Technology Services
Switch: +61 8 6212 0100
Fax:      +61 8 6212 0101
Email     kylea.white@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Web      www.focalsystems.com.au

A KAZ Technology Services Company - visit our website at
http://www.kaz-group.com


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