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

Crossroads Connections

Infor ERP Tips & News from the Experts

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

Mount Olive Pickle Chooses Crossroads RMC for BPCS Data Collection

Anthony Etzel 0 29015 Article rating: 5.0

Mount Olive Pickle, a leading producer of pickles, peppers, and relishes in the United States, has chosen Crossroads RMC as their solutions vendor for data collection and manufacturing production reporting. In the first phase of the project, the Crossroads team will implement the Inventory Visibility Data Collection software connected to BPCS. The transactions to be implemented include PO Receipts, Transfers, Component Issues, Cycle Counting, and Production Receipts.  

CROSSROADS RMC MEMBERSHIP IN COMMON USER GROUP / EXHIBIT AT COMMON CONFERENCE

Crossroads RMC 0 27994 Article rating: No rating

The  Annual Meeting is COMMON’s largest educational event of the year, with four full days of in-depth IBM i, AIX, and Linux-related education that includes all-day pre-conference workshops, open labs, and a wide variety of regular-length sessions. It is the annual meeting of the COMMON membership and the largest gathering of the Power Systems user community. Come see us in Booth 203.

 

Crossroads RMC is also proud to announce our membership in COMMON for 2016. We look forward to partnering with COMMON and providing valuable content to their user community and sharing in dialogue with users across the country.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Setting Up New Employees in LN

Kathy Barthelt 0 65903 Article rating: No rating

In LN, the People package is used to register the employee’s hours and expenses. To support the People package, the Employees – General (tccom0101m000) session only contains the general employee data.

The title of the Employees – General (tccom0101m000) session was changed to Employees – General (tccom0101m000).

From the Employees – General (tccom0101m000) session, users can start the following sessions to define the more specific employee data:

  • Employees – People (bpmdm0101m000).
  • Employees – Project (tppdm8101m000).
  • Employees – Service (tsmdm1140m000).
  • Skills by Employee (tcppl0120m000).
  • Employees by Team (tcppl0150m000).
  • Roles by Employee (tcppl0170m000).

After users define the employees, users can also start the listed sessions from the Employees Dashboard (bpmdm0101m100) session in People.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Optionally Include Tax Amounts In Order Balance

Kathy Barthelt 0 81176 Article rating: No rating

In Baan IV, the order balance amount always includes the tax amount. Consequently, the tax amount must be recalculated every time an order line is modified in order to update the balance correctly. If the tax provider is activated, this requires an API call for every re-calculation of tax.

In Infor LN, users can select or clear the new Include Tax in Order Balance check box in the COM Parameters (tccom0000s000) session to indicate whether users want to include tax amounts in the order balance amount. This parameter has an effect on various sessions in Order Management.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Changing the Master Schedule

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You can change your master schedule by specifying the type of master schedule update to perform. You can run a Net Change or Regenerative Schedule.

You also have the ability to clear the lower level requirements out of the Planned and Firm-Planned Order file.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: ERP Setup - Pros & Cons

Kathy Barthelt 0 84930 Article rating: No rating

Pros
Each legal entity can have its own general ledger and balance sheet.
Income statements can be generated for the different logistics companies.
Accounting user must go in and out of companies if there is a need to view or create transactions in more than one company.  However, if all companies are tied to the same financial group company, centralized payments, cash receipt application, and display and printing of ledger transactions and trial balances are possible for both companies from within the financial group company.

Cons

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Understanding What Goes On Out On The Factory Floor – Part 4

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Understanding: What Was Issued to the Shop Order

The shop order inquiry program provides several function keys. By using the function key for the material, the display will present what components have been issued under the issued quantity column. You are also presented with the required quantity. While viewing the quantities you may see that more was issued than what was required. Possibly there was scrap and more material was required to be issued. Perhaps there was an over issue and the balance of the material is slated to be returned to stock.

A red flag should go up if the Shop Order quantity finished is equal to the required quantity for the end item and all the components have not been issued. You may want to investigate why.

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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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