RE: Problems invoiceing -- BPCS-L

There are records in the BBL file(the 4 orders in question), nothing in the
ESH file.

Jim ... thanks for your interesting challenge ... perhaps others cam learn from this discussion. I am happy to see that of the areas I suggested in my last post, you gave info on what you found, and other people were able to diagnose what seemed suspicious, because I can sometimes have difficulty figuring out some of this stuff.

BPCS programs tend to assume that there needs to be a match of all ingredients in all relevant files ... if something missing, program bypasses without neccessarily good error message audit trail to let you know that it did so. There are also assumptions made when reading through records ... the customer order application heavily depends on sequence #s ... access this or that using 1 2 3 4 5 6 etc. continuous counting ... but if some action has caused one of the line #s to get deleted so that what is out there is good data on 1 2 X 4 5 X 7 BPCS programs will read 1 2 then stop, so we have to be especially careful about what we use when getting rid of unwanted records, and not reorganizing files when there are relevant unfinished business.

For the orders in question, are the line # sequence #s contiguous?

I am just a computer technician ... I am not intimately familiar with step by step what is done on which screen. Also some of the fields in BPCS seem to be poorly named, with respect to giving a clue as to what the heck data is really in there, and this is heavily true in the area of shipping. There is a data mapping challenge here of the first order, where we feel the pain of not having certain BPCS manuals. We currently have a project due with respect to extracting some info from the shipping process.

At some point in the shipping process there is a document # assigned to the shipment ... we use a sequential assignment with the shipping warehouse prefixed. This shipment tracking document # becomes the key to accessing the ESH file record, and it is also contained within the BBL file. You need to be familiar with your company's control #s assigned to various activities to help you recognize population when looking at various fields ... in other words, I might be looking at one of 10 fields labeled "carrier" and recognize that this or that one is really our customer bill-to #, another one really is the carrier # that links to the ETP file, and that one is our location that did the shipment.

Take a look at BBL.BLDOCR ... is it populated with a recognizable shipping tracking # that you can then match with ESH.SHDNO a lack of a match can be a clue as to where something went wrong

If the invoicing gets to a successful conclusion, this shipping tracking # should end up in the invoice line detail SIL.ILDOCR

Be careful with assumptions of data analysis expectations ... BPCS generates an invoice by customer order ...it is possible that several customer orders contributed to a single shipment, so that the shipping tracking # can show up on different invoices for different customer orders. Similarly, different items due on one customer order could end up having different shipping tracking #s but only one invoice.

BBL.BORD should match ECH.HORD

There is a line # in BBL.BPLIN I believe, but am not 100% sure that this corresponds to the line # in ECL customer order detail, that got shipped.

A customer order can have many lines, with only some of them getting shipped.

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Al Macintyre  http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac