RE: Does this tick you off?

Find the sales presentation for your existing package and re-sell it to
your management. And remind them that it is already paid for.


Chris Bipes
Director of Information Services
CrossCheck, Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Al Mac Wheel
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2008 8:20 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Does this tick you off?

Does a native or client server app exist for the i that fulfills the
user requirements?
jim

Yes

However, it is often easier for managers and end users to view vendor
presentations than figure out how to utilize what the company has
already invested in, or take proper education & training in the
effective utilization of the investment.

BPCS comes with scheduling software. In fact that is the very core of
most any ERP.
It can be accessed via a web face, green screen, commands, script, you
name it, although in many cases the company has to invest in some add-on
like LANSA to impiement one interface or another.

For scheduling to work right, there has to be a high degree of accuracy
with engineering such as lead times and manufacturing time, inventory,
activity reporting, etc. Sometimes when the results are messed up,
people don't want to fix the problems that cause the bad data, or
acknowledge what needs to be done to get good results.

The stated reasons for need to access some alternative package, or
application, may be unrelated to the real reasons, and the alternative
package's offerings can take on a life of their own, as other people get
interested in aspects of the sales pitch, unrelated to the threads that
led to them coming in.

Most of my managers want to see their output in Excel nowadays, not on a
green screen, not on browser, not a greenbar report, not a PC printer
report, but get the data into Excel. There are great interfaces to do
that, but they not approve $ spending, so I spend a lot of time
converting BPCS reports into Excel-input friendly format.

Give the user what they ask for, that's part of our job.

Yes it annoys me when I expend a lot of effort to get something they ask
for, then they make decisions a few weeks later that invalidate my work,
but that goes with our territory.

There's also a bit of internal backlash going on, where we are paying
excess freight to expedite raw materials in, and one of the alleged
causes of this is a planner who is using Excel, instead of BPCS, to
figure out the schedule for placing orders.