POPIMS
Parts Order Processing And
Inventory Management System
support contact cfospow@hotmail.com
Yep. A horrible name but by the time we wanted to change
it, it stuck. The main problem was trying
to sell a computer system with IMS in it. People thought that was what it
ran on.
The system start in the mid 1980's and was developed by a
firm called "London Software Specialist
Systems Ltd"
or LS3 for short. They sold the system not just in England but also in Europe,
Japan, South Africa and North and South
America.
In the early 1990's, whilst changing the system for Citroën
France, LS3 came to the attention of the second largest
software company in France, Companie General
Informatique - or CGI for short. To quote the late Victor
Kiam, they
liked the company so much they bought it. (They actually want to extend into
England).
In the mid 1990's CGI became part of IBM France and so POPIMS became a software product for IBM.
By 1999 IBM were becoming nervous of the "Y2K Bug"
and so made the decision that POPIMS was no longer going
to be developed (it also wasn't making the profit that IBM wanted from all
it divisions. This was because it was mainly
being used abroad and due to the internal complexities of the IBM accounts
the full profits from the English Team was being
swallowed up by the overseas branches.)
POPIMS is still being used (no Y2K bug found) in England, Europe and South America.
As an aside for followers of the TV programme Red Dwarf.
In the episode of the "Despair Squid" when Rimmer,
Lister, Kryton and the Cat thought that they had been playing a computer simulation
game, Lister believed he was the
head of a far-right fascist organisation that killed opponents to the system
The organisation was called CGI.
So what is it. Basically an ordering system for warehouses. It has a collection of 10 modules which support
Inventory, Kits, Suppliers (& Orders), Customers (& Orders), Warehouses, Invoicing, Goods Reception, Purchasing, Retail Pricing and, when needed, Archiving.
It can support Multi-Warehouses in different conutries and time zones, is able to cope with different currencies and different languages, both on screens and reports. It runs under CICS, DL/1, IMS and Unix.
Just what a warehouse needed.
Closer look at the Modules
