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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

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Tip of the Week: Cross Docking

Anthony Etzel 0 55684 Article rating: No rating

Cross Docking can provide significant improvements in efficiency by looking for outstanding requirements for an item (production orders, sales orders, replenishment orders) and automatically assigning the incoming item to that requirement instead of putting the item away into inventory, only to retrieve it later. Consider implementing cross-docking at your facility. 

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Cross Docking

Kathy Barthelt 0 76372 Article rating: No rating

Cross Docking can provide significant improvements in efficiency by looking for outstanding requirements for an item (production orders, sales orders, replenishment orders) and automatically assigning the incoming item to that requirement instead of putting the item away into inventory, only to retrieve it later. Consider implementing cross-docking at your facility. 

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: HOW ACCURATE IS YOUR INVENTORY?

Anthony Etzel 0 48789 Article rating: No rating

Just a refresher on a tip I’ve shared previously from Supply Chain Technology Bulletin regarding how to attain greater inventory accuracy. I thought it would be worthwhile to share again:

  • Record data regarding your inventory as soon as the items arrive at your door / receiving dock. With information, you can make decisions. Without it, you waste money, time and effort.
  • Leverage data collection, label generation and RFID solutions to make your life easier.
  • Set inventory accuracy goals for the business and for employees.
  • Train your employees so they know what is expected of them, and how to best perform their job and therefore how best to maintain accurate inventory counts.
  • Count the inventory – and do it regularly. Find a method that works best for your employees, and for your business.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: How Accurate is Your Inventory?

Kathy Barthelt 0 74190 Article rating: No rating

Just a refresher on a tip I’ve shared previously from Supply Chain Technology Bulletin regarding how to attain greater inventory accuracy. I thought it would be worthwhile to share again:

  • Record data regarding your inventory as soon as the items arrive at your door / receiving dock. With information, you can make decisions. Without it, you waste money, time and effort.
  • Leverage data collection, label generation and RFID solutions to make your life easier.
  • Set inventory accuracy goals for the business and for employees.
  • Train your employees so they know what is expected of them, and how to best perform their job and therefore how best to maintain accurate inventory counts.
  • Count the inventory – and do it regularly. Find a method that works best for your employees, and for your business.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

BPCS/LX TIP OF THE WEEK: INVEST IN YOUR EMPLOYEES

Anthony Etzel 0 50606 Article rating: No rating

Employee empowerment is important if you want to retain the skilled workforce you have and attract new talent.

Here are 5 ways you can motivate your employees to give their best every day

  1. Train your employees
  2. Give your employees the right tools
  3. Automate processes
  4. Give your employees real-time feedback
  5. Provide incentives to do more

Can you do it? Of course you can!
You don’t have to do it all by yourself. Companies like Crossroads RMC can assist. We provide training services which can be completely tailored to your business. We also provide software solutions to help automate many of your manual processes, and dashboard solutions to provide real-time feedback on performance.

If you choose to do this, the benefits to your company will be amazing. You will have a happy, loyal and prepared workforce, ready to come to work each day to make the company wildly successful.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Invest in Your Employees

Kathy Barthelt 0 77040 Article rating: No rating

Employee empowerment is important if you want to retain the skilled workforce you have and attract new talent.

Here are 5 ways you can motivate your employees to give their best every day

  1. Train your employees
  2. Give your employees the right tools
  3. Automate processes
  4. Give your employees real-time feedback
  5. Provide incentives to do more

Can you do it? Of course you can!
You don’t have to do it all by yourself. Companies like Crossroads RMC can assist. We provide training services which can be completely tailored to your business. We also provide software solutions to help automate many of your manual processes, and dashboard solutions to provide real-time feedback on performance.

If you choose to do this, the benefits to your company will be amazing. You will have a happy, loyal and prepared workforce, ready to come to work each day to make the company wildly successful.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Tip of the Week: The Key to Increasing Efficiency

Anthony Etzel 0 51435 Article rating: No rating

Want to increase your efficiency across your organization?

Is access to real time data important to you?

Take a look at how and where your information is stored. Do you have employees keeping separate spreadsheets or databases outside of your ERP?

Separate data silos means that information is not being shared between departments. This can hamper growth, and cut down on overall efficiency. Take a look at why these silos exist. Can something be done within your ERP system to avoid having to store the information elsewhere? Can an integration be cre

ated to allow the ERP to have exposure to other databases, or allow updates to occur between systems?

Need help figuring out where to start? Contact us. We’d be happy to help.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

Tips: LN | Baan

Kathy Barthelt

Infor LN & Baan Manufacturing Tip: Performance Problems in Generate Order Planning (cprrp1210m000)

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.

  • Be sure you are always on the latest solutions with the planning sessions. We are constantly improving the software to gain more speed in the Enterprise Planning (EP) sessions.
  • The number of planned items is critical. Try to reduce the number of planned items. Is it necessary that all items be planned via EP? For shop floor stock the TPOP or SIC replenish systems are often more suitable.
  • When you use PCS, be sure to close the projects when they are finished. When a PCS project has status Closed, the customized items will not be planned.

It's better to run Remove Plan Items for closed Projects (cprpd1220m000). This session removes the item planning data for customized items of closed projects.

  • If you run EP with the option, Also Generate Item Master Plan and/or Online Update Item Master Plan, consider if you need an Item Master Plan for all plan items. An Item Master Plan is usually meant for global long-term planning. Again this is not very useful for shop floor stock. Reducing the number of master-planned items improves performance.
  • When you use Resource Master Plans; are all your resources really critical? If a work center is not critical do not create a Resource Master Plan for it.
  • When using Item Master Plans and/or Resource Master Plans, set in Scenarios (cprpd4100m000) the total scenario length as short as possible. For example, if your sales order horizon is 2 years, a scenario end date which is 3 years after the current date is sufficient. During the calculations of the Item Master Plan and the Resource Master, all periods defined in the scenario are checked and calculated. So if you have the end date of the scenario on 2038, EP will do the calculations (for every master-planned item) until 2038.

Defining a rolling scenario will keep your scenario length constant and you don’t have to worry that you run beyond your scenario's end date.

  • Updating the pegging relations has a serious impact on the EP performance. In EP Parameters (cprpd0100m000) you can set the Pegging Horizon in days. Keep this horizon as short as possible. The Update Signals by Item/Planner option also has some impact, but less than the pegging.
  • EP uses the so-called phase numbers to detect the lowest level in which an item is used within a BOM structure or in a supplying relation. If the phase numbers are not ‘up-to-date’, EP will correct the phase numbers during the planning. This takes time during the planning run. If there are loops in BOMs or in supplying relations, this recalculation has a big impact on the performance. Therefore you could run Compute Phase Numbers (cprpd6200m000) on a regular basis. For example once a month. Always run this session with the Generate Report option selected. If loops are detected these are reported. Be sure to solve all the reported errors.
  • When unexpected results occur, especially when the data is imported from external packages, always check the number of records in tables cprpd100 and cprpd120. The number of records should match! Remark: From 10.4 onwards the table cprpd120 has become obsolete so this point not applicable anymore.
  • The number of calendars also impacts planning performance. Then for every warehouse, work center, or BP, and so on, a different calendar is defined. Planning has to read all of these calendars from start to end. This can have a huge impact on performance.
    • If you link a calendar to a work center or warehouse, avoid defining a new calendar for every work center/warehouse. Try to link the same calendar to more than one department.
    • Define the start of the calendar close to the start date of the scenario. For example, the current date is 01-07-2014, the start date of the scenario is 365 days in the past. So a start date for your calendar could be 01-07-2012.
    • Define the end date of the calendar not too far in the future. Depending on the end date of the scenario you could use 5 years ahead.  For example, the current date is 01-07-2014, the end date of the scenario is 3 years in the future. So an end date for your calendar could be 01-07-2022. Do not define an end date past 19-01-2038, which is the last UTC date Infor LN can handle.

Also, the interaction with the database can have a big impact on performance. 
A commonly used way to improve the total run time of the EP run is to start the session in parallel processing. 
See also Knowledge Base Article 22881401 Performance, Tracing and tuning Guide, for more details.

These guidelines are just some hints, and a good starting point because performance is a complex issue.

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