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Project & Activity Performance

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mcl
Advanced Member
Posts: 29
Advanced Member
5/18/2009 1:28 PM

    Our consultants are suggesting the use of the Activity module for several tracking and reporting issues that we have for a city government.  We have grants, projects, contracts, enterprise funds, etc. that will be treated as projects or activities in this module.  I remember reading one forum issue on an update or closeout program for this module.   What is the history of this module in performance, and is there a limit to the number of Activity "groups" that it can handle.

    Recently, we have moved toward tracking and reporting our Worker's Comp budget and expenditures and our custom tracking of utility costs per facility with this module.  Now I am looking at storing and reporting the cost items of our fleet department's work orders. 

    I would like to hear how this module has been used, what issues you have encountered with it, and advice about our planned usages.

    Thanks,

    John Henley
    Posts: 3353
    5/18/2009 2:05 PM
      It depends on 1) what version you're on, and 2) how you set up the activities.

      - If you're on version 9, and use the account category structure features correctly, that will alleviate a lot of the problems I have seen. Most of those are related to clients who migrated from 8.0.x and haven't re-implemented AC/BR to take advantage of the structure features. So, they duplicated the way they have it set up in 8.0.x, which means they have millions (I've even seen BILLIONS) of account / account category assignment overrides. That translates into a huge database, and requisite performance issues.

      - Most of the AC/BR provide selection by activity group, activity list, collection, etc. and (up to 6) activities. So, when you run AC190 (the AC posting program) as a standard practice, you might run it for a collection of "ALL" activity groups. The problem is that the update programs lock contract/summary activities FIRST, then update, then unlock everything. The problem is that it locks the activities even if there is nothing to be processed. This means the AC/BR system is essentially locked and unavailable during the posting/update processes, which could be several hours or more. For some organizations, this might be an overnight job, and it's OK, but for others (one client I work with is global & 24/7), so this is just not an option). The solution is either to create more granular activity groups, and only run for each group in sequence, rather than for ALL groups.

      The solution I developed for them, however, pre-processes the available transactions for each major update (AC190, BR130, etc.) into manual lists, which are then used as the selection criteria. So if there is only one transaction to post, AC190 locks only one contract activity.

      Lastly, the AC580 balance rebuild program simply will not run in a timely manner for activity groups with large number of activities (i.e. it takes > 24 hours to run).
      Thanks for using the LawsonGuru.com forums!
      John
      mcl
      Advanced Member
      Posts: 29
      Advanced Member
      5/18/2009 3:37 PM

        Thanks for you reply.  We are still in the devleopment stage, so nothing set in stone yet, and we are 9.0, so maybe avoid some of the override problems.

        What do you consider "many activities" and is the system set up to handle the introduction of 25 - 35 new activities per day?  I know so little about the module but it seems to be more the "set up actvities and add one or two a month" rather than "add 25 a day"