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Lisa,
Well, I assume you know what BPCS does.
Do you know who your readers will be?
If they will be USERS of BPCS-based system you probably should NOT
touch dcomp. It's what the screens and reports are for and how to use
them that matters.
If you are writing for PROGRAMMERS or MAINTAINERS of the BPCS-based
system then you have a different problem altogether. For that, as an
English-language writer, you will be totally out of your depth. You
have to write about the esoteric parameters, codes, macros and script
segments that go into customising the BPCS system to your environment.
But I believe that sort of documentation should have been provided by
BPCS to your maintainers as part of their training.
Perhaps you are working FOR the maintainers to record which parameters
they have set when they were fitting BPCS to the company's
requirements, and why they have been so set. If so, dcomp will not
scratch the surface of your need, for it is the REASON for the
paramater choices that will be most important in the long run. You
see, a trained maintainer (at some later date newly appointed to the
company) will know how to interpret the parameters already there, but
will not and should know why they have those settings, so not to make
a wrong choice when making other changes at that later date. Of
course, those who set up the system should have written that
background description as they went, or embedded it as comment with
the parameters, but this is the real world.
There is no shame for you, as you are a writer not a programmer,
asking for help from the team leader. That's what Content Experts are
for!
regards
P
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Peter Collins, VIVID Management Pty Ltd,
26 Bradleys Head Road, MOSMAN 2088, Australia
+61 2 9968 3308, fax +61 2 9968 3026, mobile +61 (0)18 419 571
Management Consultants and Technical Writers
email: peter -dot- collins -at- bigfoot -dot- com ICQ#: 10981283
web pages: http://www.angelfire.com/pe/pcollins/
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