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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 Day: Inventory Transactions

Anthony Etzel 0 586 Article rating: No rating

Define Inventory transactions for issuing components to the shop and receiving finished items. See the Inventory help text for examples of transactions.

  • Transaction type I - Single Issue to Shop Order. Use this transaction type to issue one component at a time. Use this for high-value items that are marked as Must Single Issue on the Item Master file.
  • Transaction type M - Multiple Issue to Shop Order. Use this transaction type to issue all the components as listed in the Shop Order, in one transaction. Note that this transaction type does not issue Must Single Issue items.
  • Transaction type S - Receipt from shop. Use this transaction type to receive the finished item into stock and update the shop order accordingly. 

The Shop Order Lot/Location Allocation program is an alternative to using the above Inventory transactions. Use this when the item is finished, and you want to review exactly what was used to make it. You can review the components as allocated, make any changes, and finally accept the finished order.

Baan/LN Tip of the Day: Multi-Company Warehousing 10.4

Kathy Barthelt 0 435 Article rating: No rating

You can define internal trade relationships between enterprise units or individual warehouses of the same logistic company for the transfer of material, labor, or other costs between warehouses, and to generate invoices for these without using sales orders and purchase orders. For example, you can use this to transfer goods between warehouses in different countries.


You can define warehouse surcharges, which are added to the actual costs of the goods either when the goods are issued from a warehouse or when the goods are received.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Day: MRP/MPS Simulation in LX

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The system allows you to manipulate and maintain a simulated MPS and MRP. You can copy the simulation from the existing first cut, or you can create a totally new schedule. You can also perform a simulation of the rough-cut capacity plan. This allows a quick visual inspection by inquiry or menu of needed work center

loads for the proposed MPS. After you choose a suitable MPS and rough-cut capacity, the system allows you to transfer the simulated MPS to the live Master Production Schedule.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Default Order Frequency

Kathy Barthelt 0 1943 Article rating: No rating

In Baan IV, requirements for an MPS item with the order method lot-for-lot result in daily planned MPS orders.

For example, if a plan period contains 10 working days and the net requirements for an item in that period is 2000 pieces, an MPS planning run generates one planned MPS order of 200 pieces for each working day in the plan period.

In Infor LN, requirements for a planned item with the order method lot-for-lot result in one planned order per plan period.

For example, if a plan period contains 10 working days and the net requirements for an item in that period is 2000 pieces, a master planning run will generate a single planned order of 2000 pieces for the first working day in that plan period. To influence the order quantity of the planned orders, enter appropriate values in the Maximum Order Quantity field and the Order Interval field in the Items – Ordering (tcibd2500m000) session or choose a fixed order quantity.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Day: Cost Accounting – LX

Anthony Etzel 0 868 Article rating: No rating

The challenge in cost accounting is tracking your manufacturing to the levels needed for useful management information. You need feedback for corrective action; but, you need to minimize the cost of collection. Some parts of your operation require specific job-cost tracking while the Just-in-Time areas require

costing in terms of cost per process hour or day. Apply overhead in different ways to different processes and products. Segregate costs into enough detail

to provide management with an accurate picture of the contents of your product. Material, material overhead, labor, fixed overhead, variable overhead, outside processing, outside processing overhead, and so forth all have to be considered.

 

LX meets your cost accounting needs with the following functionality:

▪ Four sets of costs: actual, standard, frozen standard, and simulated

▪ Nine user-defined elements per set

▪ Full and partial cost roll-up and simulation

▪ Cumulative in-process cost tracking

▪ Cost summaries by item

▪ Cost definition tied to work centers or material type

▪ Process hour costing

Baan/LN Tip of the Day: Vendor Rating

Kathy Barthelt 0 1416 Article rating: No rating

In LN, a supplier's reliability is no longer based only on correct deliveries. The vendor rating functionality of LN is based on various objective criteria and subjective criteria that can be used to calculate the vendor’s rating.

 

The set up procedure for analyzing suppliers has changed completely compared to Baan IV.  To execute the vendor rating process, users must update the vendor ratings in the Update Vendor Rating (tdpur8850m000) session.

If users update the vendor ratings, the following stages exist in the update vendor rating procedure:


1. Calculate actual weightings

2. Calculate ratings for objective criteria

3. Calculate ratings for subjective criteria

4. Update overall vendor rating

Baan/LN Tip of the Day: Release Commissions/Rebates to Invoicing

Kathy Barthelt 0 3103 Article rating: No rating

In Baan IV, this session is called Release Commissions/Rebates to Invoicing (tdcms2201m000) and is used to set the status of the commissions/rebates to Reserved, or Closed. In Infor LN, this session is only used to set the status to  Closed. Users can reserve commissions/rebates in the Reservation and Approval of Reserved Commissions/Rebates (tdcms2202m000) session. In addition, the following fields are added to the Release Commissions/Rebates to Invoicing (tdcms2201m000) session:

▪ Commissions to Accounts Payable

▪ Rebates to Central Invoicing

BPCS/LX Tip of the Day: How Does LX Fit in With Just-In-Time?

Anthony Etzel 0 364 Article rating: No rating

For years, repetitive manufacturing industries have been applying many of the principles in Just-in-Time philosophy. They have established balanced production lines that depend on a steady flow of material to each work station. They schedule production in daily or weekly rates rather than in discrete shop order lots. They track finished inventory by work center rather than by job. They typically backflush stock balances (decrement stock balances upon completion of specific manufacturing steps rather than issued at the beginning of each production run).

 

Costing is typically based upon a daily rate or hourly rate rather than being associated with specific shop orders. 

 

Repetitive manufacturers use MRP II software adaptable to their environments

in the following key areas:


 Product definition

 Inventory tracking

 MRP/Master Scheduling

 Shop Floor Control

 Purchasing

 Costing

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

Tips: LN | Baan

Anthony Etzel

How to Improve Customer Shipments With OTTO - A Case Study

Setting Industry Service Standards

Shenandoah Manufacturing, a $20 million producer of poultry-raising equipment (heaters and brooders), had been having difficulty for some time shipping orders to customers in a timely manner. They had successfully implemented a popular ERP system and had been using it for more than 3 years, yet the situation didn't improve. 

Customer Service Representatives were complaining about the frequent backorders and late orders. Employees were giving it their best effort, but were frustrated, and customers were threatening to take their business elsewhere.

The company considered installing an APS system as a possible solution, but found implementation would be difficult, expensive, and running the system might be a challenging task as a number of key business practices would have to be changed. A consultant familiar with OTTO suggested they look at that product as an alternative to APS. Several OTTO aspects cited by the consultant convinced them to consider a cursorily review. Specifically:

  • The non-intrusive nature of the product.
  • It's relative inexpensive initial investment.
  • The low overall total cost of ownership.
  • The integration with their ERP system.

The initial demonstration was impressive. OTTO was installed on Shenandoah's server within 45 minutes of arrival and, most impressively, it was fully functional with their real “live” data immediately. Needless to say, the demo was well received. Even more importantly Shenandoah was able to “test drive” the software to prove its applicability before making any dollar commitments.

According to Mark Shank, Information Systems Manager, some baseline measurements were made last year, and it was determined that approximately 50% of their customer orders had shipped on time. As they began using OTTO, on-time order performance rose to 90% for the month. And Shenandoah caught up on its entire backlog and started working ahead on February's orders. In February on-time shipment performance jumped to 92% and subsequently on-time performance has ranged somewhere between 98.3% and 99.5% — well above the 96% goal set by Management.

OTTO provides the means for keeping the whole production organization focused on the few things that have to happen as the ship date approaches to get each order shipped on time. Components that have the potential for delaying an order are identified so they can be managed. Shenandoah's staff, a precious and limited resource, now concentrates on analyzing information and managing the right things at the right time rather than digging out date. To quote one production control individual: “what use to take hours now takes seconds.”

According to Roy Hackett, Plant Manager: "Knowing the right things to pay attention to at the right time — information provided by OTTO — has allowed on-time shipping to be improved by 40 percentage points in less than one month and a lead time reduction from 3-4 weeks to 1-2 weeks on the most important products"

Guessing at what and how much of the work being processed is for real customer orders versus planned orders is eliminated which is especially important when capacity is short during the heavy portion of the business cycle. 

“By focusing on the right things at the right time, production expedites and interruptions are far fewer, production flow is much smoother and productivity is significantly improved.”

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