Any Experience with Multiple Time Zones

[DValenti]

We are in the process of establishing a new district. This district operates 10 hours behind our other districts. We have set the district control parameter to minus 10 hours. This setting seems to be ignored as we cannot process work orders, purchase requisitions etc once the time in the other districts is the next day (error message number 0130, DATE REQUIRED CAN'T BE BEFORE TODAYS DATE) ie from 2pm local time in the new district. This is a major operational problem as the plant is effectively a 24x7 operation.

Any suggestions on what other settings may need to be made? workarounds? would be appreciated.

Thanks

David

 

[payers]

David,
This issue was discussed at the recent conference held in Brisbane and it was going to be put to the design team for a resolution. This issue does not affect me but the Mincom contact that was going to push it through is Andrew Vellnagel (e-mail - Andrew.Vellnagel@mincom.com). He may be able to forward any information that has been found out.

Paul.

 

[DValenti]

Payers - Thanks for the contact. I suspected that there was a problem and you've virtually confirmed it.

 

[AlanCWilson]

There is another way of acheiving this by setting up two different TP environments pointing back to the same database. The different TP enviroments would be on the local time for that user, one for US, one for UK.

This makes the application think it is in local time, yet the operating system & database logging still work on machine time.

That district control parameter really only changes the date & time in the top right of the screen while still storing all the data with the main system time. This is okay for a company who has another office in the state next door who is only an hour or two different. The other approach of multiple TP is better for wide timezone differences.

As with everything, there are issues. The main one being that you can only do this is these groups of users operate in seperate districts. Doing this in the same district will cause all sorts of nasty data corruption.

We have two companies using this approach in production in Australia and I beleive one in US somewhere.

Talk to you local Mincom Support group about an Initial Planning Study to work this issue through for your company.

 

[Eternalwarrior]

Candian Defence runs the true 24/7 system across the world in all Time Zones. They use GMT as a Standard Time which seems to work for them.

I know some of the issues they had were scheduling but I believe they have removed several cyclic jobs and have them loaded into the MSF080 record through the scheduler.

 

[ozrockrat]

David
While having not experienced this particular problem before I can offer a few tips on finding out where date problems are occuring. Without knowing your setup I would suggest as a first step eliminating whether or not the problem is in the front end (GUI) or a code issue. If you have access to a character based MIMS (MINT, 3270 etc)run the process on these to see if the problem is still there. MSQEXP/MSQMUI pull the date from the local PC and this can sometimes cause a clash. A date format mismatch between local PC and the MIMS date setup can also cause some problems.

If this does not help send me your hardware & software setup and I will see what I can do.

Regards

Bevan Walsh
Professional Services Manager
Design & Report Teams UK Ltd
bevanw@designreports.co.uk