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Infor LX Tips, Infor LN Tips, BPCS Tips, Baan Tips, Infor M3 Tips & Infor ERP News

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Infor ERP Tips & News from the Experts

Infor LX | Infor LN | BPCS | Baan | Infor M3

Kathy Barthelt

Infor LN & Baan: What are your production orders telling you?

Measure what you want to improve.

Six simple words, but put together they convey a powerful concept that can transform manufacturing companies. It’s a basic concept that’s hard to argue with: Collect data, see where the data leads you, and make changes that have a positive impact on the data. Repeat often.

If your company is manufacturing a product, you’re more than likely creating manufacturing variances. These variances tell managers where the company is not performing to the standards that were created and agreed to by those responsible in the Engineering, Finance, or Production Departments. There is almost a 100% chance you are creating either favorable or unfavorable manufacturing variances and, quite frankly, none of the variances will ever be favorable because the company is either over-costing or under-costing the production parts.

The data is all there within your ERP system… or at least it should be… provided that you are not tracking production information outside of your ERP system in a spreadsheet.

Analyzing your production orders can help you track down:

  • Missing labor entries
  • Incorrect labor standards
  • Incorrect time estimates for routing steps
  • Inaccurate or non-existent material issues
  • Work order structures that are not accurate
  • And more


Crossroads also offers a Production Order Variance Report package for Baan and Infor LN which quickly identifies problems with pricing, materials, efficiency, and rejects. learn more> 

Not sure where to start? Crossroads RMC’s supply chain and manufacturing audit can help identify problem areas in Purchasing, Customer Service, Billing, Inventory, Costing, Bills of Materials and Routings, Material Requirements Planning and Shop Floor Control, and more.

Request a Supply Chain & Manufacturing Audit, or Contact me today to learn more - 800.762.2077

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Kathy Barthelt

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

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.

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Tips: LN | Baan

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