This is a huge topic. You ought to get some BPCS schooling.
There are many places, mainly consultants, that offer it.
It is like going to IBM school to learn about the platform.
If your company's BPCS was installed properly, there should be a file in
your library list by the name of BPCSDOC which is accessed from the DOC
menu, but I normally use PDM.
BPCSDOC has many members, each one being a "manual" for one application area.
This is "poor man's documentation" for people who cannot spend the $
1,000.00 to go to BPCS University, or spend the $ 250.00 got get a quality
BPCS manual. Plan on spending weeks digging into thhis "documention" before
you can get good value out of it.
You ought to start with SSALOG00 which is the LOGIC manual explaining how
BPCS works, what may be done, what should not be done. In this
documentation there are claims to various BPCS standards ... when I first
learned BPCS approx 20 years ago, I was told the standards were about 85%
followed by the BPCS company and the various consultants who modify it. I
have tried to follow the standards in my own modifications. In my
estimation, there are many consultants who follow the standards, and many
who totally disregard them. For the vanilla code, I think the 85% is a good
estimate at my version of BPCS. There are many versions ... they work
somewhat differently, so you should always identify your version when asking
questions here.
Check BPCS-L archives. There have been many posts about various
documentation available from Infor/SSA & third parties.
When BPCS was delivered, it came with many additional pieces of
documentation, which your company may or may not still have.
Years ago when I had a heck of a lot more spare time than I have today, I
created a web site with links to various places that have BPCS
documentation. Some of those links still work, some don't.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html
When you see name of outfit whose links no longer work from my web site, you
can put the outfit name into a search engine. The company is still out
there in most cases.
I would advise against adding fields to the Data Dictionary.
This is one of the areas where the standards get violated.
When we first got BPCS we were told that the file layouts had space on the
end for clients to add fields, and we added many, then a new release came
out which replaced files .... some bigger, some smaller, some files with
stuff that was in prior files, like a jigsaw puzzle rearranging what was
where. Today when we need new fields we either use one of the user-fields
where we can use the BPCS literals system to rename the labeling on the
fields as they appear in the vanilla code, or we add a new file with links
to the vanilla files.
For example, we found some fields on common screens like INV300, BOM00,
SFC300 etc. where we were not using the contents of those fields, and they
were reference fields, that BPCS documentation claimed were not used by the
vanilla software, but you would need to get the DS Solutions Manual to be
sure of that claim ... we have found that claim to be incorrect in some
cases. So we reassigned some fields from the reference naming given by BPCS
to names of our choice. This works find on BPCS software, but is no good
when using other IBM OS tools to access the same files. You have to have
easy access to the Message Member place which stores these various
references ... this explained in SSALOG00, but you still need to give some
thought how to organize the stuff, so that when BPCS comes out with new
releases & opatches, it is easy to merge in your substitutions with their
replacements.
The BPCS XRF module lets you create your own cross-references, but in our
version it is security corrupted ... the only way we could get it to work
was to give everyone master security access ... I decided I did not want
that information that much, but I did run it in that mode in a test
environment ... make sure everyone stays out, sabotage security on test
environment to get the darn thing to work, get the reports, put security
back the way it should be.
Instead I have a 400 dump of object information from GO CMDREF command into
an *OUTFILE in which I use Query/400 to find what programs do what to what,
which works on standard programs, but a lot of BPCS uses soft coding, where
the object name is determined at run time.
chadalawada kumar wrote
Hi,
I just moved to BPCS from JDE,...can someone guide me how this ERP
works,..like how to add a field in the Data Dictionary, how to look
for a program,..any standards.Any procedures/subroutines.
Thank you in anticipation.
Srini
midrange.com
