Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Advantages / Disadvantages of Virtualization

Kathy Barthelt / Wednesday, May 3, 2017 0 200816 Article rating: 5.0

I know a lot of our customers are considering virtualization projects. I came across this, and thought it might be useful:

The advantages of virtualization include the following:

• You get more out of your existing resources. Pool common infrastructure resources and break the legacy “one application to one server” model with server consolidation.
• You can reduce datacenter costs by reducing your physical infrastructure and improving your server to admin ratio. Fewer servers and related IT hardware means reduced real estate and reduced power and cooling requirements. With better management tools, you can improve your server to admin ratio so personnel requirements are reduced. • You can increase the availability of hardware and applications for improved business continuity. • Securely back up and migrate entire virtual environments with no service interruptions. Eliminate planned downtime and recover immediately from unplanned issues.
• Gain operational flexibility. Respond to market changes with dynamic resource management, faster server provisioning, and improved application deployment.
The disadvantages of virtualization include the following: • Virtualization adds overhead to the CPU, memory, IO, and network. • Virtualization adds an additional layer to the hardware and software stack. Therefore, additional complexity is introduced in the following circumstances: When sizing the physical server. When planning VM capacity. When planning multiple VMs on the same physical server. When investigating performance issues.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Summarize Transactions by Account or Journal Source

Anthony Etzel / Wednesday, April 26, 2017 0 44178 Article rating: No rating

When you elect to summarize transactions, either by account or journal source, you must remember to turn ‘Journal Grouping’ on in the event. Without this ‘Journal Grouping’ flag set to ‘On’, each transaction creates a separate journal, negating the effort and impact of summarization.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Setting Up Interest Invoicing

Kathy Barthelt / Wednesday, April 26, 2017 0 118207 Article rating: No rating

You can set up interest invoicing in Accounts Receivable and in the General Ledger.

To set up interest invoicing, use these sessions:

Invoice-to Business Partner (tccom4112s000)
For invoice-to business partners for which you want to raise interest invoices, select the Charge Interest checkbox.

Mapping Scheme (tfgld4573m000)
Use this session to define the mapping of the Interest Invoice / Revenues Analysis integration document type.

Interest Percentages (tfacr5102m000)
Use this session to define the interest percentages for each financial business-partner group, and for different periods of days.

Interest Invoice Related Data (tfacr5101s000)
Use this session to define whether interest must be calculated on unpaid invoices, partly paid invoices, interest invoices, and/or fully paid invoices. You can also indicate that LN must take advance payments, unallocated payments, and credit notes into account for the generation of interest invoices.

Optionally, set conditions
Example: LN only generates an interest invoice advice entry if these conditions are met: The total of all advice entries in one currency is higher than the allowed minimum amount of an interest invoice defined in the Minimum Amount for Interest Invoice field.

The invoice is overdue for a greater number of days than the number of days defined in the Minimum Days for Interest Invoice field.

FSB North America Streamlines Their Shipping on Infor LN with RMCship

Kathy Barthelt / Monday, April 24, 2017 0 25429 Article rating: 5.0

FSB North America, a leading producer of high quality electrified and mechanical locking devices, has selected the RMCship solution from Crossroads RMC to streamline their shipping process on Infor LN and the integration with FedEx® and UPS Worldship™. Using Web Collect formerly RMCship for shipping increases accuracy by eliminating manual steps, streamlines operations, and process steps, and improves customer satisfaction.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Vendor Evaluation

Anthony Etzel / Tuesday, April 18, 2017 0 46365 Article rating: No rating

Want to ensure that you have the materials you need when you need them?Want to gain insight into your ability to fulfill current and future orders timely?

Consider implementing a method of evaluating your suppliers. A good understanding of your suppliers’ capabilities and past performance allows you to better plan and deliver orders on time to your customers.

Some ERP systems have built in features to track supplier performance data. Reports can also be written to gather the information you need. By whatever means you can achieve it, getting those results could be eye opening and very meaningful to your business.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Vendor Evaluation

Kathy Barthelt / Tuesday, April 18, 2017 0 85254 Article rating: No rating

Want to ensure that you have the materials you need when you need them?

Want to gain insight into your ability to fulfill current and future orders timely?

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Transactions

Anthony Etzel / Wednesday, April 12, 2017 0 49937 Article rating: No rating

If you opt to summarize transactions, do so after a period of testing so that you can be certain that all models and aliases are working to your satisfaction. When you summarize, consider ‘Summary with Detail’ because this retains the detail transactions in GLH.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Creating Product Variants

Kathy Barthelt / Wednesday, April 12, 2017 0 77820 Article rating: No rating

If you specify a configurable item on the sales order line, you can configure or link a product variant.

An item is configurable if the Configurable check box is selected in the Item - General (tcibd0101s000) session.

Manufactured items with theDefault Supply Sourceset to Assembly in the Item - General (tcibd0101s000) session and Generic items, are always configurable.

Purchased items with the Purchase Schedule in Use check box selected in the Item - General (tcibd0101s000) session, can be configurable.

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Crossroads RMC / Wednesday, April 13, 2022

/ Categories: Because I Care, Analytics Dashboard

Dashboards vs. Reports – What do they offer and which do I need?

Companies are collecting oceans of data, and struggle with transforming it into usable information. Most businesses focus on two methods of sharing data - the report and the dashboard. While these two terms mean many things to many people, it is important to understand what these terms mean and how the report and dashboard have similar features but they are not the same thing.

What is a Report?

A report is meant to be used to gather detailed intelligence on the operations within an organization, thus a report can be either very broadly covering a wide scope of related information, or narrowly focusing on details of a single item, purpose, or event. All of this information, while presented in a report, is meant to be a snapshot in time.

Quite often, a report is built within the ERP system itself and often is constrained by the graphical and user limitations within the ERP. More often than not, large amounts of data are exported to Excel where added features allow for better manipulation of the data to a format that is digestible by users. Regardless, the data is only valid for that moment and time.

What is a Dashboard?

A dashboard is a graphical interface that provides at-a-glance views revolving around answering a central question. For example, an executive may ask you for up-to-the-minute details on "how the business is doing?". The answer to that question is as complex as the organizational structure of the company, but it is probably very simply measured with approximately 10 metrics. Those 10 metrics can likely be analyzed in chart form, and can and should be combined into one chart when the numbers are relatable or are on a similar scale. All these things should be considered when building a dashboard.

Dashboards, similar to the one in your vehicle, display critical data. Imagine driving down the road and having to push a bunch of buttons to find out how much fuel you have left, or having to pull over and pop the hood to check the oil pressure. It would be dangerous and a waste of your precious time. Your car's control panel or dashboard displays the most crucial information in an easy-to-use, graphical way.

How do Dashboards and Reports differ?

First, a report contains much more detailed information. Where a dashboard might provide a CEO with information on how the entire company’s sales are progressing, a corresponding report will give the CFO or VP of Sales the ability to see how each sales region or even salesperson is performing and make leadership decisions. Just like responsibility, data will get more granular as the organizational hierarchy goes down. The C-Suite might be interested in the detailed data, but for seeing a snapshot of high-level information, the dashboard is the desired mode.

Second, a report is much longer than a dashboard. Not only in the amount of detail but also visually. Tables and charts that live within a report can take up many pages. Furthermore, a report will likely require the reader to scroll through many screens or click from page to page.

A dashboard should confine its display to a single screen with no need for scrolling or switching among multiple screens. Something powerful happens when we see things together, all within eye span. Likewise, something critical is compromised when we lose sight of some data by scrolling or switching to another screen to see other data.

When an individual dashboard has so much information on it that scrolling is required, the power of the dashboard is diminished because the information that lives there is intended to be viewed together. Each piece of information on the dashboard is meant to give the reader the ability to answer part of the central question of the dashboard. These charts combine to answer the question, so if the reader can’t see them together, making them work together is much more difficult.

To sum it up, a report is a more detailed collection of tables, charts, and graphs and it is used for a much more detailed, full analysis while a dashboard is used for monitoring what is going on. The behavior of the pieces that make up dashboards and reports are similar, but their makeup itself is different. A dashboard answers a question in a single view and a report provides information. Put in another way, the report can provide a more detailed view of the information that is presented on a dashboard.

With dashboards, you can empower your entire team with data insights in real-time information, so your data is never stale. Users can create and share custom views of your data on the fly, in minutes.

With powerful Dashboards, you can:

Create pie charts, graphs, interactive maps, and more with just a few clicks.
Build a dashboard once and make it instantly available on any device.
Tell a story with your data with your own custom layouts, colors, and commentary—all with no coding and changes available instantly to users.
Know you always have current reports with real-time data updates.
Access your dashboards from anywhere–computer, tablet, or phone.