How important are Reset Allocations and Q-O-O to database maintenance?

[JulieB313]

We have recently (10/3/2011) upgraded from Progression 7.6 to ES 9.5.500.

Because these Reset reports take so long to run they were only done sporadically in Progression, but I think that in ES they seem to be more important and should be run more regularly. Is this in fact the case? (I'm trying to pinpoint what might be causing discrepancies in Purchasing reports, so I want to understand what allocations and Quantity-on-order are doing or should be doing that might affect Purchasing.)

If so, what is a good procedure for running them? If I try to follow Exact's recommendation and run just the report for Allocations it 'hangs' and prints nothing, unless I select a brief range of part numbers. The Exact help says to run the report, check for errors, then run the reset; but this would take forever running a few part numbers at a time. Also, I wouldn't be able to automate it because of the interaction necessary.

I'd appreciate any suggestions or solutions from people who are using this. Thanks! Julie B.

 

[dgillz]

I would run a file validation on the IMITMIDX and IMINVLOC and fix all errors - this may be causing it to hang. Then run the reset.

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[JayTheGeek]

Since the changes to Transit Inventory and that inventory impacting both allocation and on order quantities, we have seen an increase in the number of variances in these numbers. (I am somewhat responsible for that one!) In the past these variances were the result of messy PO changes and/or receiving issues, and only resulted in occasional problems. In our case, (we do lots of In Transit) these two reset procedures are very important.

They can not be running during the normal business day - too many record locks in our environment. I run these two routines as part of my month end procedures, an evening or weekend task. I do understand that in some cases these variances may have an impact on purchasing activities. I'm just not willing to commit one evening a week to running these reports.

I also only run each report once with the 'reset' option turned on. We have far too many items and locations to spend the time reviewing all those numbers.

The current solution for automating these reports is archaic. We have Event Manager as part of the purchased software solution. It seems completely silly that maintenance such as this could not be scheduled to run from within the Event Manager environment. This issue was brought up at a past Engage session, and the fairly senior people there agreed that these maintenance reports should be rewritten. I expect to see something in SSRS soon.

Until then, if you are OK with dedicating a machine and user license to deferred reports, I expect that it would work and could be scheduled to mesh with a purchasing or mrp cycle in order to minimize the impact of variances.


Jay

 

[JulieB313]

Thank you for the responses. This is precisely the info I needed to confirm my conclusions from my research. Even answered a question I thought about, but didn't ask (deferred reports) -- because I didn't want to mess with that, either!

Once again, you guys come through, thanks so much,
Julie B.