You can use job management to schedule jobs based on your organizational requirements. For example, you can schedule jobs at non-peak hours to improve the overall system performance in a heavily loaded environment. A job consists of one or more sessions or shell commands, or both, that run without user interaction. The sessions and shell commands in a job can be started while you are not logged on to the ERP system. You can schedule jobs to start processes periodically, at a defined interval, or immediately. Typically, you use job management for print and processing sessions.

Job data  - To create a job, you must specify basic job data and link sessions or shell commands, or both, to the job. In the basic job data, you specify whether the job is periodical. For periodical jobs, you specify how the job will be scheduled.

Shared job data tables  - Typically, each company stores its own basic job data. As a result, a job runs for a particular company. However, in a job, you can also run sessions in more than one company. You can run sessions in multiple companies when the job data tables of the associated companies are physically mapped to a single main company.

Job execution - Jobs can be started in multiple ways. The job’s status defines how you can start the job. You can start the job if the job’s status is In Queue or Free.

Job history -  When the execution of a job stops, for example, when the job completes successfully or when a runtime error occurs, information is written to a history log. The job history contains information, such as the date and time of the execution and the reasons why the job and its associated session ended.

Sales quotations are used to supply a sold-to business partner with the required details to make a purchasing decision.

You can create a sales quotation in response to a request for quotation (RFQ) from a business partner, or as a sales tool to initiate the sales process with potential business partners. A quotation includes the dates, terms, items, or item descriptions to be sold, and a success percentage, which reflects the level of certainty that the quotation will be accepted. Sales quotations are included in the planning modules based on their success percentages. Quotations with a high success percentage are considered as sold.

You can print and send quotations to business partners. You can specify the results of the returned quotations in Sales. If the quotation is not accepted, you can...

In the Financial Statements module, you can:

• Define financial statements, and link a structure of child statement accounts and parent statement accounts to these financial statements.
• Link ledger accounts and/or dimensions to the statement accounts.
• Link cash flow reasons to cash flow statement accounts.
• Export financial data to FST reporting tables.
• Print reports directly, or use the BIRT report functionality to print to PDF, HTML, and export to Excel or Word.

Data drill down in financial statements - You can...

The planning data for the method of manufacturing is defined in Routing. A routing consists of operations, with each operation identifying the last to be carried out in a work center and/or on a certain machine defined for a specific site.

Routings can be as follows:

• Standard Routing - A generic routing that can be attached to multiple items
• Item specific - A routing that is applied to one item
• Network routing - A routing containing sequentially ordered operations and parallel operations
• Order quantity dependent routing - A routing that is defined for a specific quantity of items

You use the Routing module to record routings for manufactured items. You can define the following:

To improve performance and reduce database growth, deleting records is highly effective. The disadvantage of deleting records is that data is no longer available. Usually, however, not all records need to be saved. For example, line activities are stored by warehouse. Normally, you do not need to keep these records. Therefore, after closing a warehouse order, line activities can be removed. The User's Guide for ERP LN Archiving and the corresponding Baan IV/V Guides describe several sessions you can use to delete old data. Other data such as items and business partners can be reviewed once in a while, after which you can delete the data you no longer need. For every order and contract table, a session is available to archive and delete old orders. In these sessions, you can specify several characteristics to select the orders to be removed, such as date or status. Run these sessions on a regular basis.

After a week of blocking the Suez Canal, the now-famous cargo ship, Ever Given has been freed from the 27,000 cubic meters of sand and mud that were surrounding the ship. Supply chains are flowing again. I for one am very glad to hear that the ship has been freed since coffee, toilet paper and a whole host of other items were being held up! In all seriousness, it was and is a crisis that will have ripple effects on the global economy.

As I often do, I started to relate this crisis to the world of ERP that we live in. Although we are not responsible for dealing with a situation like what happened in the Suez Canal, we all deal with problems in our jobs every day. Some of these problems are small, and some are not so small. Some problems are caused by human error, some by prevailing winds that blow us in a particular direction, and some by circumstances out of our control. It is what we do about the problems we encounter that make all the difference. We could bury our heads and hope the problems somehow go away on their own, or we can take action and do something to bring about the change necessary to get past the blockage.

I see “blockages” every day in working with my customers. Sometimes it is a lack of understanding of best practices in a given department, or a reliance on tribal knowledge that determines how and why something is done in the system, or inefficient manual processes destroying a company’s efficiency, or hundreds (or thousands) of customizations standing in the way of an upgrade, or employees labeling an ERP system as “no longer a fit” when their company is only using 10% of the available functionality in the system.

So, maybe today we could focus on what it would take to remove the “blockage” that we have in our way. What benefits could we realize if we worked together to bring about incremental change? Could we actually get that upgrade done? Could we start operating based on industry-leading best practices? Could we increase our market share? Could we decrease our costs and boost our revenue? All of this is possible.

Contact me today so that we can begin to work together to solve the problems that stand in the way of your progress.

solutions@crossroadsrmc.com or 800.762.2077

Did you know that you can send a broadcast message to users on the system? This is especially useful if you need users to exit their sessions, or in the event of system maintenance.   

• For Baan IV users, see KB 22869250
• For LN users, see KB 1830758

When the Generate Order Planning (cprrp1210m000) session is run it can take minutes to days to finish the process.

The performance of this session depends on many settings, like the number of plan items, the number of orders, but it also depends on hardware and database setup.

Here are some guidelines on how performance can be improved...