My World and Welcome To It

A Blog for Shirey Consulting Services – Views and Thoughts About Just About Everything

Archive for August, 2007

EDI’s New Wave

Aug 30

Posted by dshirey in EDI | Comments off

Remember when EDI used to be simple?   You did a few 850′s, sent out a couple of 810′s, maybe even an 856 with one of your more daring trading partners, and you were a hero. 

Not much has stayed the way it was ten years ago, however, and EDI is no exception.  The problem is everyone keeps raising the bar and pretty soon the old standbys are just not enough.  But what are the new darlings of the EDI world?  What are the bench mark documents that you simply have to be doing to be somebody, anybody?  

Inbound Remittance Advice (820)
This is a payment notice.  It comes from your customer in response to an 810 (invoice) from you and it indicates how much they are paying and what invoices (generally) it is being paid on.  The 820 can come from either your customer or else from his bank.  If it comes from the customer, then it is an indication of what they are going to pay, while if it comes from the bank it is generally an indication of what has been paid.

Obviously, this eliminates having to post checks manually using the AR0015 function.  Batches are considered as an entity and all posting is done at the batch level vice transaction.  That means if you have 10 transactions in the batch and there is an error in one of them (maybe a bad invoice number), then the nine good transactions will be held until the one bad one is fixed.  This ensures the audit integrity of the batch.  Editing is very important here as is the matching facility, being able to match an 820 transaction against an invoice and mark that invoice as having been paid.   

Nominally, PRMS provides support for the inbound 820 (starting with 9.1 and continuing in 9.2).  The only problem is that it doesn’t work as well as it should, particularly in the matching arena.  Fortunately, SCS has a 9.2 version of this application that does work (and which has been well tested by one of our clients).  For additional information on this, please refer to the EDI page of the Solutions tab.     

Inbound Forecast (830)
More and more companies are using forecasts instead of customer orders to carry demand and so the ability to take these in must be supported.  The end goal is to load these forecasts into the Forecast File, after having gone through the necessary edits, of course.  

What makes this difficult is the fact that you are getting the same records over and over again.  That is, if you get forecasts daily then you will get the forecast for April 22 for weeks until you finally go past that date.  And so you need to know if you are going to delete your old forecast and replace it with the new one for that date, or if the forecast transactions represent changes to an initial forecast, either positive or negative.  This is not a decision you can just make on your own, you need to check with your partner and see what he is planning to send, then react accordingly.

Unfortunately, PRMS does not have any native support for this document, but SCS can provide a base system for taking in 830′s that has been in use with one of our clients for a number of years now. 

Inbound Shipping Schedules (866)
The shipping schedule is similar to a forecast, but represents what the customer expects you to ship him today.  In that sense it is the final version of the forecast.  Generally this is not loaded into the forecast files (it is too late for MPS/MRP to react to it) but instead may be used to create customer orders.

Within PRMS you would map these transactions into the Batch Order Entry system, although many customers will go through an intermediate phase of reviewing the final forecast and then, either line by line or en-mass automatically cutting the associated orders.  And fortunately, SCS also provides support for that, the solution having been in daily use with a client for several years. 

Outbound Forecast (830)
Turn about is fair play and so if you can receive 830′s you also want to be able to send 830′s.  That is, we need to be able to send your forecast to your vendors. 

This is also known as vendor scheduling and PRMS provides support for this via the Vendor Scheduling module.  You simply map the

PO and POR data that is coming out of MRP to an outbound forecast file and you are ready to go.  By default, this will be a complete replace situation when it gets to your vendor. 

Summary
There are many EDI transactions that we have not mentioned here (like the 832, the inbound 810, etc.) but this is a good start.  EDI is more than the 85x series today.  The question is, are you ready to play, are you ready to bump it up a notch and take the next step in terms of making your EDI system a competitive advantage?   If so, SCS can help you with that jump.

i5/OS – A Release is Not Forever

Aug 1

Posted by dshirey in System i | Comments off

Yes, those were the days.  The days when you could just find a version of OS/400 (now i5/OS) that you really liked and sit on it.   From the point of view of your ERP system it really didn’t matter.  As long as the release ran RPG you were good to go.  But now, that seems to be changing. 

I’ve felt it has been coming on for some time now but what really brought it home to me was Infor’s recent, low key announcement that they would not provide support for a whole range of their back office products (BPCS, PRMS, LX, BOSS, etc.) if the customer was not at i5/OS level 5.3 or higher.  

Now to be honest this announcement will not have an immediate impact on the average PRMS shop.  I think Infor will continue, through their Help Line, to provide solutions and assistance to companies on maintenance regardless of their i5/OS status.  But what might change is that if I am not at 5.3 or above they may not guarantee that the solution will work.  Fortunately, in the PRMS world I can’t think of a single thing (if you are running green screen) that is operating system dependent and so there might not be much fall out. 

But I don’t know if you can say that about LX.  It is a GUI based product and I think one of the most volatile parts of the System i operating system is the Java Toolkit which is used heavily in GUI interfaces.  And, it may not even be true about PRMS if IBM begins to play around with the data queues or as new functionality is added to PRMS because more and more we are seeing application functionality that taps right into some of the basic functions of the operating system.  And as the dividing line between application systems and operating system becomes thinner and thinner, what version of i5/OS you are on will become more and more important. 

Yeah, you are probably thinking, I guess that makes sense, but what’s your point? 

My point is that we in the System i world have gotten used to getting up to a new release of the operating system and then just sitting there for a while.  Like a decade or so.  We do it like climbing a mountain.  It is a major project, there is a vast amount of prep work, we pay enormous attention to it and stop doing anything else.  And when it’s done?   When it’s done we breathe a sigh of relief and say ‘Man, am I glad we won’t have to do that again for 5 years, maybe I’ll be gone by then’.  And that is exactly what is going to have to change. 

We are not going to be able to sit on anything for years at a time anymore.  The applications that run our business won’t let us.  Oh, we will still need to treat this like a major project and do a lot of work to get it in, but our attitude will have to change.  This is something that we are going to have to do on a regular basis and so we need to get several things set right off the bat. 

First, we need to accept the fact that if you own a System i, you need to upgrade your operating system on probably a yearly basis, and we need to let the budget reflect that.  It’s a cost of having the most reliable, flexible, and bullet proof system in existence. 

Second, we need to set up a process where we either farm it out or have someone take the responsibility for the upgrades.  Farming it out is probably the best bet, but it all depends on your situation.  This means that we can get really good at the upgrade, stop being afraid of it, and create the scenarios and test cases we need to just slam that baby in there. 

Third, we need to do a better job of understanding the operating system, of knowing what is in there and what the facilities are and what this new release offers.  You don’t need to be a super techie or anything, but you definitely need to have some understanding of what’s going on and why this new release is different. 

We in the System i world are definitely more traditional and patient than our brothers and sisters in the Windows world.   And I think that’s a good thing.  But sometimes, too much of even a good thing is not good.  A new day is dawning with respect to the operating system for the System i.  And, for our back office applications if for nothing else, we need to be ready to greet that dawn with a cup of coffee, a white crème donut from Dunkin Donuts, and a great big smile.  Or something like that. 

In Defense of the Tour

Aug 1

Posted by dshirey in Uncategorized | Comments off

It’s about 11 PM here on Sunday, July 29, 2007 and I am just finishing up watching the last stage of this year’s Tour de France.  Missed it this AM because I was on a century ride up the White Pine Trail from

Grand Rapids to Cadillac.  I guess that’s a good reason.  So now I am busy hydrating myself with a Molson Golden and watching the tape from earlier in the day. 

Yeah, I know what you’re going to say.  The tour is over?  Who cares. 

Well, I do, for one.  For the life of me I can’t understand why anyone would want to watch the Masters or anything from Talladega but both of those events mean a lot to some people, just like the tour means a lot to me and I have gotten almost dependent on seeing it over the past few weeks, sometimes watching the same stage race two or even three times. 

Yeah, there have been some embarrassing moments this year; a key tour leader resigning after failing a blood test, several teams withdrawing after one of their riders tested positive for banned substances, and the race leader and probable winner being fired by his team at the height of the race for failure to properly comply with anti-doping rules.  But at the end it was a great tour with two veterans who have always been at the forefront of the anti-doping effort and a rookie who has battled his way back from a severe injury ending up, after 19 days of racing in all types of conditions, just 30 seconds apart, the closest podium finish ever in a tour. 

I know doping and cheating are a problem.  And cycling is always held up as the poster child for what’s wrong with sports, but chemical cheating is not something that is limited to cycling.  And in cycling if you fail a test you are suspended, sometimes for up to two years.  How many other sports can match that level of severity?  At least nobody on the tour was implicated in a dog fighting ring. 

The truth is, cycling is working hard to remove something that has crept into every sport and I am proud of the effort that they are making.  The peloton’s refusal to start the race in one of the late stages was a protest against the riders who do dope and it put them on notice that not just the race organizers but the rank and file riders are on the lookout for illegal behavior.  With the development of new blood profiling technology there really is a hope that the sport can be completely cleaned up, probably long before you can say the same thing about the NFL or MLB. 

This year’s tour memory for me will not be ‘cheating’ but rather ‘class’.   Levi Leipheimer started the tour as team Discovery’s leader, the man everyone on the team would be working to get into the yellow jersey.   But somewhere in the Alps it became clear that one of the young riders on the squad, Alberto Contador, had the legs to go all the way this year.  And so, in one of the class moves of the year, Levi quietly, and without fanfare, stepped aside as contender and began working to put his teammate at the top. 

I know it’s hard for a lot of people to understand the importance of teammates in a bike race.  Isn’t everyone riding his own bike?  What difference does it make if you have team mates?   But the truth is even for great riders it is sooooo much easier if you have someone in front of you to focus on and help ‘pull’ you along, someone who will help you go faster than you could alone and then who will get out of the way when you are near the top and you start to pour it on.   And that is what Leipheimer (and Popovich) did for Contador.  He did it without throwing his helmet down or storming off the team bus.  He did it without making ‘anonymous’ comments to the press about being screwed over by team management.  He did it without any of the posturing and preening that has become the face of American sports.  In the end he said to himself ‘Alberto has a better chance to win than I do’ and he went out and worked for his teammate.  That is the image I will take out of this tour. 

That doesn’t make saying goodbye any easier, however.  There is no sporting event like it in the world, you know.   I may be only a modest cyclist, but I have at least a sense of what the riders go through and there is no doubt in my mind that the tour represents the greatest test of individual stamina, will, and power in the world.  And there’s something noble and uplifting about that, something inspiring and good.  Yes, it has it’s rough spots, but what doesn’t.  Sometimes you have to look beyond the bruises on the outside and see the true heart within, the heart that is ready to put it’s own dreams aside and sacrifice for the needs of others.   Not a bad image to present, you know.Â