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A company can fail by going it alone, not using tech support, not budgeting people resources appropriately, doing lots of work THEN getting the education in how to do it right, or not using consultants that specialize in helping with such projects. Now I have worked with different BPCS consultants, and I love them, but there is a definite conflict of interest. They make money by helping you with a variety of things, so if you have a conversion project that is needlessly long, with massive excess expenses, has lots of things done wrong that you will need their help to fix later, this is great for their pocketbook. So watch out, some consultant advice is not neccessarily in your best interests, and some will mean a successful implementation that is much more expensive than it needs to be.
One of the great features that can be underutilized, or messed up, is for tech support to connect to your system thru the ECS line. Thanks to group jobs, a bunch of them can be signed on at the same time doing different things. Management "saved money" by putting the ECS line at the end of our switchboard collection, so that it was the last line used. This meant that when we got real busy, the normal phone use knocked off the ECS crashing whatever the consultants were doing, and we were paying a LOT of $ for their time. So whatever was "saved" by not giving the ECS a private line, we paid several thousand times over by crashing our own emergency tech support a lot. If your ECS cannot be a private line, you too can pay thousands times more cost by having consultants at your site for weeks on end, who could have done the work much more inexpensively over an ECS private line. There are some scenarios where it pays to bring BPCS consultant personnel to your site. There are many where it does not.
Ask your BPCS tech support about BPCS classes. Several places offer them, mainly focused on the workings of various applications, but also include the process of BPCS implementation.
Most implementations is done with a modicum of help from BPCS consultants and/or BPCS tech support, or a lot of such help. One of the tools they provide is a flow chart of BPCS files showing the sequence in which they need to be setup, and the names of the programs with which to do so ... codes into this or that file defined before they are utilized into that other file. Do you in fact have that flow chart? Ours is long gone. It was a wall chart that we marked in grease pencil, then wiped later. The good part about that was if we needed to add more stuff later, the chart again was a great guide to that function.
See if in your BPCS library list you have a file called BPCSDOC.Each member in there is a separate document about some aspect of BPCS. Start with SSALOG00.
The documentation that comes with BPCS is comprehensive but poorly cross-indexed. There are good manuals. Ordinarily I suggest UPI's because they do a great job of explaining how BPCS works and how the pieces interconnect, but I think what you most need may be the BPCS Overview Reference manual from DS Solutions http://www.dssolutionsinc.com/OverviewManual.asp
Remember the archives of this BPCS_L go back for years, and can be searched for past posts on some given topic.
I not updated my weblog in years, but most of these links still valid http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.htmlWhen we converted, it was a nightmare, even though we were going between two versions of BPCS, because we had done things so differently on an earlier version that did not support facilities. We ended up abandoning the SSA conversion tool and using other tools to convert contents of files of older system to BPCS.
In the case of General Ledger, we had a separate environment setup with the new Chart of Accounts and other Accounting rules entered manually with a series of Pilot environments receiving from there and from the converted files, until one fine day when the leader of the Pilot Team declared this was Good Enough, we are going to go live with what is in this latest Pilot. Thus our library names are non-standard, based on the Pilot naming.
Conversion to BPCS comes with a sizing questionairre ... what do you need on your AS/400 iSeries to support BPCS once it is up and running. A fly in this ointment is inadequate provision for what is needed in transition to get there. We got stuck various places in the conversion, so we had intermediate files a lot longer than originally projected. We typically had several environments going concurrently testing various software. We also had M36 which OS/400 i5 no longer supports. Upshot, we ran out of 400 disk space, and some very weird stuff happened. This is a scenario I urgently suggest other people avoid like the plague.
Hy Guys,We're designing a new chart of accounts for our company and I'm defining a project schedule for this task. From my small experience with SAP (I've never worked with BPCS before), It's not going to be simple. Since you guys have more experience, can you help me with a list of steps that I have to do in ths system in order to get things working ?I believe I'll have to have a paralel system running with our actual system for at least 2 or 3 months, reset all the accounts and accounting rules... But I don't know the details. Thanks for the help, Rony --
- Al Macintyre http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9MacFind BPCS Documentation Suppliers http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html
BPCS/400 Computer Janitor at http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com/
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