Record Locking

kpapenfuss

Active Member
We have attempted to use JD Edwards' Lock Manager in OneWorld. Although we haven't gotten it to work yet, we have been told by JDE that Record Locking only works with interactive applications. It does not work between interactive and batch applications. What this means is that we can't perform online Sales Order processing while running Pick Slips. In our Sales Order implementation, we have experienced instances where someone was online in an interactive application updating a Sales Order, while the batch Pick List application was simultaneously processing that same order. The user, from within the interactive application, then updated the Sales Order after the Pick Slip application had finished updating its order status. Since the interactive application at that point did not have the most current image of the data record, the Sales Order reverted back to the status prior to printing of the Pick Slip. When the Pick Slip application ran the next time, that Sales Order was reprinted, resulting in a duplicate shipment to the customer. We have been notified at least twice of duplicate shipments caused by this issue.

We have also experienced this same issue in the interactive and batch processing of work orders and I expect that it is the same with purchase orders. My question is how other companies deal with this issue?

Keith Papenfuss
The Vollrath Co., LLC
Xe, SP14.2, Coexistent, AS/400, NT, WTS
 
Keith,

We had exactly the same problem with duplicate shipments as well as customers receiving shipments for cancelled orders. I had seen this problem occur a few times per week after go-live and tracked it down to someone being in the order detail making a change or even cancelling the order when the pickslip program was running. The sales ledger record would read for example, 520/540 980/999 540/545 in that order. I called JDE and couldn't believe that the record locking doesn't work with batch processes. I was actually hoping that this was taken care of in Xe.

We did some pretty heavy mods to pickslip prints to resolve this issue. The problem we experienced was two-fold:

First, we needed pickslips to read the lock file while those pickslips were being read. Pickslip print is actually composed of a few different steps. First is the inventory commitment step, where all order lines soft-committed at order entry are then hard-committed. We had this business function first read the record lock table and ignore all orders in this table. Any orders that are not ignored by the inventory commitment business function are flagged on the order line by being committed (this way the pickslip print function would not print orders that were not hard-committed, preventing orders from printing that were entered in-between the inventory commit function and the print function, which is another issue we experienced!!)

The pickslip print function would then only read and print orders that were flagged as being read by the inventory commit function.

Second, we needed pickslips to actually add a record to the lock table when either of these business functions were running, which prevents users to get into the order detail. They get a message that the order is reserved by our administrator, which they know means the order is currently being run by pickslips.



JDE said that this batch jobs are designed not to lock records, this isn't a bug, but I strongly disagree. Their solution was to add an activity rule for orders about to go through pickslips, but that wouldn't help, because that would be another batch program to update them, and we'd be in the same boat.

We have about 50 customer service reps constantly adding, modifying and cancelling orders and pickslip versions run for the different warehouses for about 20 minutes of every hour. We couldn't very well have order entry from 9-10 am, pickslips from 10-10:30, then order entry again 10:30-11:30 for example, so heavy mods were our only option. I have a feeling this is happenning for many other sites that haven't done any mods. I'm also starting to wonder if other batch jobs run throughout the day (ie backorder release)aren't causing problems as well, so I'm going to do some more testing right away!

These mods were a lot of work, but they have proven very effective. If you want to know more detail, let me know and I'd be happy to provide.

Thanks,

Justin Revoredo
Amersham Pharmacia Biotech
Piscataway, NJ
OW B7332 SP11.1
AS/400 Oracle - Citrix and fat
 
Does the lack of any reply mean that this situation is the same at all companies? How do companies which enter and ship hundreds of sales orders each day address this? In today's dynamic business world this appears to be a major hole in OneWorld's infrastructure. Any thoughts or solutions would be greatly appreciated.

Keith Papenfuss
The Vollrath Co., LLC
Xe, SP14.2, Coexistent, AS/400, NT, WTS
 
I agree and think that pressure should be put on JDE to re-evaluate their thinking on this. I'm starting to think that in my company's case, backorder release is affected as well. And with all the different UBE's that could be running at the same time as interactive apps there's a huge possibility of data integrity issues.



Justin Revoredo
Amersham Pharmacia Biotech
Piscataway, NJ
OW B7332 Coexistence SP11.1
AS/400 Oracle
Citrix/Fat
 
We haven't ran into this yet... but it maybe possible in lieu of JDE actually fixing it too modify some of these UBEs to check the F00095 to see if anything is locked for the tables or row that the UBE needs to run against.

XE SP15, Oracle 8.1.6 on W2K,Citrix/W2K, NT 4.0
 
Does anyone know which interactive applications have record locking capabilities? I have been monitoring the P00095 application and only seen P4210, P4310, and P4312 show up. I expected to see some of the work order applications since we have alot of that kind of activity, so I tested P48013, Enter/Change Order - (Work Order Details). I have determined that it doesn't write to the F00095, so changing UBE's to check it won't help. My concern is how do we maintain data integrity of work orders without restricting batch and interactive processing to separate time periods (which is impossible in our manufacturing environment)? I have to believe that data integrity issues must exist at all OneWorld installations where there are a significant number of transactions occurring simultaneously.

Keith Papenfuss
The Vollrath Co., LLC
Xe, SP14.2, Coexistent, AS/400, NT, WTS
 
Re Work Orders reservations in F00095.

Check out SAR 5051069 which corrects a problem in this areea.

regards,

Larry Jones
[email protected]
OneWorld XE, SP 15.1
HPUX 11, Oracle SE 8.1.6
Mfg, Distribution, Financials
 
The program name needs to be in the UDC 00/RR for JDE to use record locking.


Don Mattes
 
 
Back
Top