Automated Costing Utilities

About two months ago, we installed the Automated Costing Utility service on a VM with Visual Manufacturing 9.0.4 and went through the set up process. It is scheduled to run each night shortly after midnight.

After the initial install, it ran properly for about a week then stopped working. The service was still running but it wasn't doing the costing and entries in the log had stopped.

We uninstalled, reinstalled and it started working again for about a week.

I opened a ticket with Infor, they said that changes to the Scheduler could cause it to stop working and suggested stopping and restarting the service. Did that and the again is worked for about another week.

Monday it stopped working again. A stop/restart of the service yesterday did not get it running again.

Our channel partner has told us that there are many reports of the automated costing service not working properly. Is anyone able to get the service to run consistently?

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i have no issues with the costing service scheduler running in my environment.

We do not use the Costing Utility but we do use the MRP utility and experienced a similar issue. We run a full MRP every Sunday so on Fridays we put a scheduled task on the application server to stop and restart the service automatically and have not had a problem since. We are on version 8.0 however.

We are running 9.0.5 and have experienced similar issues with the Costing and MRP services. My workaround for this is a Windows Scheduled Task to start the Costing and MRP services shortly before they are scheduled to run, and another Scheduled Task to stop the Costing and MRP services shortly after they have completed. Started doing this about a year ago and haven't had any issues since.

Yes! Same issues. Did you make any changes to the autorun settings the day before it stopped working? The solution from the ticket I submitted with Infor is any time you make a change to anything regarding the schedule or options you need to restart the Windows service. Our issue for Costing was after month close and we re-enabled the Costing application we failed to restart the Windows service and although the Windows service was running, costing did not automatically run. I believe there is a bug to be fixed. Enabling a schedule from Visual should be the last step, not restarting a service. ers.infor.com/.../Ers_Details.aspx

Yes, there are some known bugs, but I'm not having any issues like that - use the SVCs to run schedules for Costing, MRP and Concurrent Scheduler. Currently on v906, in use since v901, upgrading to v908 this week.

I can follow-up with you next week if you want me to share my experience.

No changes were made to the autorun settings prior to any of the failures.

Series_Part 3_FICA in Social Security.mp4

And I'd like to clarify, the Infor person specifically asked if we'd made changes to the MRP Scheduler (not anything related to the automatic costing schedule). I asked how changes to the MRP schedule would matter but never got an answer.

I was going to start using the automated costing utility but we have had quite a few problems with the equivalent scheduling service and the one that prepares the data for the graphical window. They have both stopped several times. It would appear that changing the scheduled running time or shutting down the server can cause problems and services need to be restarted manually. We have had problems of not being able to restart the services as well - we had to uninstall and re-install them. These utilities are not very robust to say the least.

For now, I am testing the solution from qtsmuhr with the daily starting and stopping of the service. With the erratic behavior of the service, it will take a while to see if that solution works for us. I will post back.

We too have seen that restarting the Windows service did nothing to resolve the issue with the jobs not running and that uninstalling and reinstalling was the quickest solution to resolve the issue over extensive troubleshooting. One additional suggestion by Infor was to set the Windows services to an Automatic (Delayed Start). I've written up part of my issues with the application as an enhancement request. I'd be happy to endorse any you submit regarding the autostart services.

Just had a reboot of the servers last night and had to run all the windows services processes manually this morning. It happens on every Windows update. It takes hours to get caught up. We run MRP, Scheduler, Before and after queries to it and Costing utilities. We have tried to push the updates to only once a month but it still causes issues. I will look for your enhancement request and endorse it.

@viviane Were your autorun Infor Windows services set to Automatic (Delayed Start) before the restart? I'm wondering if everyone that is having issues is having issues after a restart and the Infor services aren't automatically starting like they should.

They are set to automatic. We usually have to restart even if it show "running".

I will support any enhancement request to make these services more robust. However, shouldn't Infor be dealing with this as a defect?

We ran costing, concurrent, and MRP services on 9.0.3 and it would run for a few days and crash every time. We have since moved to 9.0.8 and all 3 services have been up for more than a month.

I spoke too soon. Costing and reporting services just failed to kickoff. It was a good run.

So it's been about two weeks since I added a scheduled task to stop the service after costing and restart it again right before its scheduled to run. So far, knock on wood, it's been running consistently.

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