Two big sources of inefficiencies in manufacturing are paper and spreadsheets. I know that you love ‘em, but they are the cause of more problems than you probably realize. Think of how long it takes you to get paper based data into the hands of those who can do something valuable with the data. Are you capturing all of the information correctly? Timely? What about those spreadsheets? Can everyone access that information across your organization? Is that data married with all of the related data regarding your operations to give your executive and middle management the information they need when they need it?

Make your shop floor paperless and put in place systems that talk to one another and automatically pull and push data to and from your ERP so that you can look in one place for all the information you need to run your business effectively.

If you’re not doing this today, you might as well be burning money.

Ok… so you want to know the status of a specific shop order that was released two days ago.

What do you do?

It’s a sure bet that you have a manager, supervisor, or planner who can walk the floor and find the order at whatever work center it happens to be at. He/she can then answer “what operations have been completed and how many were completed?” All this requires leg work, and of course, a fair amount of time.

Now, if you have setup your BPCS master files properly, and you report transaction activity, you should be able to get those shop order statuses much faster using the SFC300 Shop Order Inquiry Screen.

At your fingertips you can see:

• Release date & due date
• How many hours remain in total and at each operation
• The quantity required, what was finished and the remaining quantity
• What components (materials) have been issued

Pretty basic information, right? Are you getting what you need to know? If not, then you may want to reexamine how your BPCS files are setup and what transactions along with their frequency are captured.

Users can personalize sessions and apply special formatting to the data displayed in sessions. The personalizations and formatting settings that are specified by the users are stored on the LN server. Administrators can maintain these settings.

• Session personalizations

  Users can personalize sessions in various ways. users can, for example, hide fields, change labels, customize the toolbar, and move fields to another tab. Administrators can maintain the personalizations defined by the users. For example, an administrator can export personalizations to an XML file, import personalizations from an XML file, and copy personalizations to another user, to a DEM role, or to a company number.

• Report personalizations

  You can use the Report Designer (ttstppersrep) to personalize the layouts and style of reports, without modifying the standard reports or using an external reporting solution. The changes are stored as personalizations.

  You can also generate new reports that are based on a selection of fields from the application data model. These reports are generated in the extensibility package. You can personalize these reports in the Report Designer (ttstppersrep), or modify them in Infor LN Studio.

  For details, see the Infor LN Report Designer Development Guide
   

• Conditional formatting

  users can define conditions to apply special formatting to the data displayed in LN sessions. The users can define multiple conditions per session and different types of formatting, such as a specific color for particular fields or rows, and a warning symbol for particular rows. Administrators can maintain the formatting settings specified by the users and can define system-wide formatting settings.