RE: [BPCS-L] Problems invoiceing

[Alister Wm Macintyre <macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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.

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