Re: Taking out old part numbers

Parallel concerns to help your analysis.

Some BPCS programs read some customer order files using a sequence #,
expecting all the intervening #s to be there. Let's suppose you have a
customer order that slowly gets more items added (up to 999 sequence #s) and
some of the old items on there are among those you want to delete. If the
order now has sequence @s 1 2 3 6 7 (because you deleted lines 4 5 that had
unwanted item) some BPCS programs will read lines 1 2 3 then quit, because 4
aint there. You will need to have archiving software (several vendors
offer) that can rebuild the sequence #s of the customer order files, after
you have removed some lines. And then there are other files that point to
those lines, such as invoices.

We used to delete employee clock #s when they no longer on the payroll,
however some of our reports on the work that had been done, that focused on
efficiencies by part, or work center, had employee who did it, kind of
incidental to the report, but with turnover, and deleting old employees, the
data records with work reported on clock #s that no longer existed, they no
longer on many reports. So ideally, we need to pick a vintage ... we are
interested in these reports data up to X months ago, so only delete employee
clock #s for employees who left us more than X months ago.

Not so long ago there was a change in management, with the new management
getting a bank loan based on our total AR. My big mouth questioned whether
there might be an ethical problem doing this with a report showing total
over 90 days old, when some of the entries there are really 3-4 years old.
The fact that the AR report is a bit misleading might not be important if we
not using it to get bank loan. The new managers were perturbed when I
showed them how to see how old some unpaid stuff really was. The old
managers had only cared about volume of continuing business with the
customers.

We had been purging invoices when over a year old, so I was not able to
reconstruct what was shipped on the oldest unpaid invoices. I have since
changed that purge policy, so only purge archives of invoices that are older
than the oldest unpaid AR.

So one criteria associated with unwanted old stuff, is how old do we need to
keep data on parts we no longer manufacture, purchase, have in inventory,
etc.

-
Al Mac
-----Original Message-----
From: Don Cavaiani
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2009 3:59 PM
To: bpcs-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [BPCS-L] Taking out old part numbers

No vendors please.

Any warnings/caveats regarding use of strsql to delete very old part numbers
out of the database -e.g., IIM/CIC/HPO/MBM/ITH/ECH/ECL/FSO/FOD/FRT .....???

TIA

Don F. Cavaiani
IT Manager
Amerequip Corp.
920-894-7063

"It's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the
credit." Harry S. Truman