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  3. April 2006

Re: Purchase Orders & Source

You may wish to start some new thread topic(s) after digesting our replies.
You need to check on the nature of the contract your company has for using BPCS. It may be that your company is not are not supposed to have licensed access to the source code. Also check with your company's security officer. It may be that your company does have the source code, but employee you not authorized to access it, either on purpose, or by oversight when setting up access for new employee.
1. BPCS with Source Code costs MUCH more $ than BPCS without Source Code, for most versions of BPCS. Some companies management do not understand the correlation between being able to modify software, and buying the source with which to do that. Sad but true. Also some management declares they not want to modify BPCS, so not need to pay for the source, then turn around and ask for modifications, but use other terminology for what they want done.
Some companies fragment offerings, so that a client only pays for what they need. For example LANSA has a web version of BPCS where the price is based on the volume of application areas to be accessed that way. SSA works more on the model of however deep they think the clients pockets might be.
2. Most of BPCS version 6 "source" in RPG DDS CL etc. is not written by a real human being, but generated by AS/Set which is LIKE a CASE tool. This generated "source" is not in any condition for a human being to modify directly. Rather, you have to do the programming work in AS/Set. The "source" for AS/Set, and AS/Set does not automatically come with BPCS. A company has to pay extra to get it. See Management misconception in # 1 above.
There are third party places that have access to this, and can do the modifications for your company, instead of having an in-house employee do it, or have in-house staff access the stuff on the 3rd party company computer. This is more expensive to implement than having the source in-house, but there's lots of trade-offs out there.
3. Earlier versions of BPCS both came with "source", much of which did not need AS/Set, and did not cost extra $ for this. However, even when BPCS is supposed to have all the source, there are some glitches, in which some programs got supplied without source. This was deliberate in the case of the licensing, that controls how many users can use BPCS on some CPU serial #, and accidental on a scattering of other programs.
If a company got to its current version of BPCS from one of the earlier source-supplied version, then some former employee may have kept the source accessible for research purposes.
4. There is also human error by former employees who might store source code off of the AS/400 to save on disk space, but not do proper backups on media that is still any good years later. Or similarly, did get everything, but not install everything to their AS/400. 

Now how you figure out the system is to use the Documentation.
Yes Sir, there are lots of manuals for BPCS, and guess what, they do not come free with the system. There is on-line documentation that comes free with BPCS, such as BPCSDOC file (each member is a source document) in which beginners to BPCS should start with SSALLOG00 (logic manual) but as useful as this is, buying a set of BPCS manuals will save you a lot of grief. 

There's also various educational conferences for BPCS.

As for HOW to do something.
Get thee to where you want to do something in BPCS.
Put cursor on whatever line you want to change.
Do F1 which is the BPCS HELP KEY
Scroll thru the options, such as how to print the specific help, or the overall help.
Depending on your contractual research, you may have access to the source code for the help support, which is written in the programming language UIM which is conceptually like HTML.
How do you change a part number on a purchse order in BPCS 6.1? Can anyone give me some information on how or what do I do about getting source for BPCS programs in 6.1? We have several programs without source. I have never experience working with programs without source code. How in the world do you figure out the system without source code?

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