Re: Files and counters maintenance -- BPCS-L

Manual maintenance is available in BPCS to reset the next number, whenstored in ZPA, via a variety of menus, such as SYS.

BPCS does a great job of adding records as needed, but is not so great atcleaning out old unwanted records, such as shipping paperwork from 3 yearsago. Depending on business volume, you want to avoid having these filesfill up, causing like a Y2K situation (running out of numbers). Some ofthe old stuff can be removed using options on SYS/23 which MUST be rununder very restrictive conditions ... check out REORG in BPCS_Larchives. There is also an issue of performance and investment in diskspace if there is a high ratio of unwanted records to wanted records. Forexample:

* For every one currently open customer order
* There are 25 customer orders that satisfied customer needs
* For every one customer order line with something to be shipped
* There are 50 lines that are completed

BPCS does not have cleanup software to handle 100% of the files. Yourchoices include:

* Buy one of the archiving packages that are out there for BPCS
* Contract with one of the BPCS software houses to write fixes for you
* Write your own fixes
* Do nothing and wait for BPCS to blow up when it runs out of numbers

There are also what I consider to be fairly well known bugs in BPCS, someof which got fixed in later versions, and some of which arrived for thefirst time in later versions.

A lot of the AS/Set written software uses the maximum size fields for RPGwith no provision for work that is called for by the IBM RPG manuals, sothat all over the place there are what we might call rounding errors ...for example zero times one can get a result of negative 0.00002

You need to be extremely careful about purging lines from multi-lineobjects. Some BPCS software reads the data in sequence # line 1 2 3 4 5 6etc. and if you have deleted line 3 because you no longer need it, someBPCS software will look at 1 2 then when realizing that 3 does not exist,will stop at that point, and you never get to 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 etc.

You need to be extremely careful about rejiggering any numbers in thesystem. Data gets processed using control #s that were assigned in earlierfiles. Those numbers need to remain in sync.

Suppose you delete an item # that is no longer relevant, then later alongcomes new business to which that old item # gets assigned. The way BPCSworks, as soon as you delete the item, various other data on that item canno longer be accessible, then when you reassign the item to somethingunrelated, all that unwanted baggage is suddenly there on the new item.

  I still think that must have a manually maintenance.