Thing-1 . the limit on # of users is associated with the contract with the
BPCS vendor, for permission to use their software license.
From time to time they conduct an audit to make sure the license has not
been violated.
The larger the #, the higher the price which was paid. There may be an
annual renewal fee.
If the # of real employees permits it, the # could be lowered, so company
pay less money.
I advised against that for us, because whenever there is a need to increase
the # of users, they charged an arm and a leg for the change.
Over time, the way they conducted that audit went thru some revisions, so
however they did it last time, might not be the way they will do it next
time. So your facility needs to be able to interpret the contract different
ways, and make sure you are obeying the different interpretations. The
definition of a user, when one person might have multiple sessions. We had
a "public sign-on" with very limited inquiry access, on various boxes all
thru the factory, so shop workers could look up inventory, orders,
engineering etc. for the work they doing. One user-id, but six different
people. We had a real production BPCS, and a testing-development
environment.
Some people, like IT and training-leadership, in both sets of user-ids, with
slightly different naming, as sign-on-id defines the environment.
One PC might have workstation id based on who is the latest employee working
there . JOE PETE ANDY etc.
I was overruled when I tried to have names like BUY for purchasing dept,
SALES for marketing dept, SHIP for shipping dept, etc. because otherwise
when a device goes down, it can be hard to figure out where it is
physically.
Anyhow, when a device in use, it spawns a bunch of work areas, file members,
work station work names, which are no longer needed when a former user name
is no longer with us. They need to get cleaned up. They don't take much
disk space, unless we have thousands of them. Managing this is another
nuisance for IT. A big help for me was IBM OS can output listings to
*OUTFILE which we can then access in a query or program, to list what work
areas etc. have not been used in eons, are empty, so Ok to eliminate.
When a user is gone from the company, they need to be removed from BPCS
security, so they are not counted against the 250 limit.
Some people could not be removed, for complicated reasons.
Alister Wm Macintyre (Al Mac)
Panama Papers group:
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8508998
midrange.com
