Re: Implement new chart of accounts

Al,

Thanks for the comprehensive information. I guess I'll ask for a stronger 
support from our IT team and involve SSA earlier in the process.

Can you give me more information on how you worked with the the separate 
environment, how was the setup of the accounts and rules and how did you manage 
to have both environments receiving all the journal entries ? Your experience 
and dificulties will certainly help us to avoid pitfals that could jeopardize 
this project.

Rony

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005 06:16:13 -0500, Al Mac <macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxxx> escreveu:

> De: Al Mac <macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Data: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 06:16:13 -0500
> Para: "SSA's BPCS ERP System" <bpcs-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Assunto: Re: [BPCS-L] Implement new chart of accounts
> 
> The computer trade press used to be filled with stories of failed ERP 
> implementations.  This is a much easier scenario to get into than a 
> successful implementation.
> 
> 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.html
> 
> When 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/Al9Mac
> Find 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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