SMS Scheduled Housekeeper (continued)
5. Archive data up to a predefined date
Archiving is an absolutely essential part of maintaining a fast running system. The archiving routines in the software take records from live data tables and moves them to archive data tables which should speed up searching operations throughout the software. There needs to be an input which allows the customer to specify the date that they want to archive back to. This date will be either 12 months, 15 months, 18 months or 24 months from today's date. There needs to be checkbox options to allow archiving of different tables to be turned on and off. The tables available to archive are Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, Picking Lists, and Works Orders.
By default this should be set to never run as a bit of thought needs to be put into setting this up. It is recommended that this task is run only weekly, not because it should take too long but purely because there is no real benefit of running it nightly. The first run of archiving should be run manually as this can take a serious amount of time. After the archiving is up to date it should be able to run comfortably every night, as only one weeks worth of records will need to be moved. Parameters:- SOs (Y/N), POs (Y/N), WOs(Y/N), PLs (Y/N), Archive record prior to date in months (12, 15, 18, 24)
6. BOM Integrity
As the program name suggests, the function of this routine is to test that all Bill of Materials on the system are integral. It may be possible, due to a number of reasons for one or more levels of the BOM to have become orphaned. Orphaning is where the link to the next level in the data has been destroyed or corrupted. If this program runs through successfully without any error messages, it means that all of the BOMs in the system are integral, and that there is no recursion. This event runs the program in the All BOMs mode.
7. Validate Stock Items
In a complicated multi-user system such as Sage Line 100 / Sapphire Manufacturing the chances of computer failure can be high. For example an individual workstation being switched off during the processing of a sales order could easily damage the stock record leaving the balance on the stock item incorrect. This event runs Validate Stock on all stock items, which analyses relevant information within Sapphire to recalculate the "In Stock", "On Order", and "Promised" figures against each stock item. For example the In Stock figure is recalculated by adding together all of the GRN levels against the particular stock item.
8. Run sdatacheck
Checks the integrity of the data within the svndata folder (all rin and rel files). Sends email to defined email recipient. The sdatacheck software will all need to be installed on the machine that the Housekeeper Event Handler is to be run on. This finds any data corruptions withing both the Sage Line 100 and Sapphire Manufacturing parts of the system.
9. MRP Calculate Requirements
The Material Requirements Planning Calculate Requirements program is an absolutely essential, but rather time-consuming program for all customers using the module. Depending on the amount of data you have in your system this program can take up to an hour to run, making this the perfect program to run at night when time is not an issue. This will automatically accept all of the parameters set up in MRP - Utilities - Parameters - Options.
10. Align Stock Files
Sapphire uses Sage Line 100 Stock Control database files but provides many additional parallel files to store other Sapphire specific information. This program is normally only used at the system implementation stage to ensure that these parallel files are correctly aligned with the Line 100 stock file. It should never really be necessary to run this program, but it does no harm anyway.
11. Check Exporter mdb
The SMS Exporter uses a Microsoft Access mdb file to store the exported data and the relationships between the various tables within the software. It is recommended that a data compact is run on this data daily, however, this file can still grow to a size which cannot be handled by the operating system. There is a limit on these files which is 1 gigabyte. If the file gets to this size then it effectively becomes corrupt, and the only way to fix it is to delete the file and rebuild it again. This event analyses the size of this file and alerts the user if it is nearing this limit. If this file reaches a size of 900 megabytes then an alert will be included in the schedule report. Parameter:- Full path to the mdb file.
12. Delete DOS spool files
Depending on the settings in the svn4win.ini file, DOS spool files are either created when a printout is sent to the Windows spooler or ignored. There is a limit on the number of DOS spool files that can be created for reasons of network drive maintenance. When the limit of 10,000 spool files is hit the DOS spool control file actually corrupts making printing impossible. For this reason SMS recommends that DOS spool files are periodically cleared down. Running this event will delete all DOS spool files back to a given date.
