Hi all,

I need help to understand what are the Operation procedures that I should look at in case of production server goes down for three days.

For example, what should we do regarding our Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, Inventory transactions? This is to help me write up a disaster recovery plan for all the department staff.

Does anyone have an idea of this or have an example of this before?

thanks in advance.

regards,

Since you dont have a system in place to enter or do any sort of transaction, i doubt these guys(purchase, sales etc) could do much other than some manual work.
To avoid a lapse of three days, i recommend having a standby server ready in case there is a hardware failure. Apart from that have a SQL backup of baan database as well as baan sequential backup. You dont have to use both the backup but depending on the type of failure, you could use either one of them.

Three days is too much....

sk

..production server goes down for three days..

3(!) days :eek: :eek: :eek: This seems pretty much like an eternity for me!
I aggree with sukesh75: it's far more better to have a proper hard- and software backup strategy available, rather than to think about what can be done manually by your employees. How many people would be without an IT-system in this time? What is your daily turnover? What time would it cost your staff to overcome the backlog of 3 (long) days?
If you answer those questions to yourself and evaluate it in money, you can easily determine whether it's worth to run a standby system or not.

Good luck!

Martin

Hi both,

I understand 3 days is a bit long. But my boss is asking me what should the Purchasing, Sales, Inventory and Production staff do when the system goes down. Should they just sit around and wait for the system to come up again?

We must have a backup manual procedure to run these departments in case of disaster. My thoughts are:

1) Get the staff to type out the documents in Ms Word eg. PO and SO acknowledgment and invoice.
2) What running numbers should I use? A new series? or type in the next number in the Baan running series?
3) Do the inventory staff continue with receiving goods and delivering the finish goods to customers? How do they handle and record the transactions?
4) How can the production staff continue with the Report Complete Operation and Production? Do they leave it and wait for the system to be up or is there a manual procedure they must follow?

Please review and confirm these steps are feasible or whether I left out any important steps.

Thanks and regards

In most cases, an organization would have their old applications which they used prior baan to fall over to for the time it takes for the server to be up again. If not for that, then those documents that are sent out of the organization. for eg..quotations, purchase orders, sales invoices etc..needs to be entered through either word document or spreadsheet so that it is presentable. All the other internal transactions like for instance issues, receipts etc could be done manually...

sk

You need to define a standby procedure in consultation of the management.
every disaster recover plan has a time frame (3 days is a long long time) by which IT Team can bring back the system to their original shape. their needs to be a system defined and accepted by the management to be used during this time so that normal functioning does not gets affected.

but it is highly recommended to have a backup server. you can also configure hard disk and place it at a seperate location.

I used to work at a site that was connected to the Baan server through the WAN. The WAN would go down frequently so we had to come up with ways to keep production and shipping going during the downtime. This was usually for only 1-4 hours of downtime.

We could do all the critical things manually so long as we kept good records. And you need people management trusts keeping those records. That's really important: your boss should be involved in choosing people to do this.

To ship we would have a copy of the Baan shipping document that could be filled in manually. To do that, print the document to ASCII format and import that into Word. Then you can erase the data and leave the form behind. When we needed it, we just filled these in manually.

Keep the document numbering distinct so you can trace it more easily. Just add an "M" (for manual) prefix to every number.