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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

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Use of Correction Period

Kathy Barthelt 0 173 Article rating: No rating

There can only be one correction period, and it must be the last period in the period table.

There can only be a correction period for Fiscal periods and not for Reporting or Tax. This period is used for the posting of the Automatic Balancing of Profit and Loss entries as well as any auditor adjusting entries that may be made outside the normal year. This allows you to print a trial balance and financial statements of period 1-12, for example, eliminating any of those adjusting entries.

If you have the Company Parameter (Balancing of Profit & Loss) set to Individual Accounts, then it is critical to have a 13th period to post those entries to. With this setting, the Automatic Balancing will zero out each individual P&L account in the last period. You want this to be period 13 and not period 12.

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

Anthony Etzel 0 346 Article rating: No rating

Ok… so you want to know the status of a specific shop order that was released two days ago.

What do you do?

It’s a sure bet that you have a manager, supervisor, or planner who can walk the floor and find the order at whatever work center it happens to be at. He/she can then answer “what operations have been completed and how many were completed?” All this requires leg work, and of course, a fair amount of time.

Now, if you have setup your BPCS master files properly, and you report transaction activity, you should be able to get those shop order statuses much faster using the SFC300 Shop Order Inquiry Screen.

At your fingertips you can see:

  • Release date & due date
  • How many hours remain in total and at each operation
  • The quantity required, what was finished and the remaining quantity
  • What components (materials) have been issued

Pretty basic information, right? Are you getting what you need to know? If not, then you may want to reexamine how your BPCS files are setup and what transactions along with their frequency are captured.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Default Order Frequency

Kathy Barthelt 0 178 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 Week: Indirect Time

Anthony Etzel 0 1002 Article rating: No rating

In Infor LX, there are two ways to enter indirect labor. You can use either SFC600 or SFC650.
 

  1. If you use SFC600 and enter a reason code for the indirect labor, the reason you entered is written to the Labor Ticket file.
  2. If you use SFC650 and enter a reason code for the indirect, the reason code is not written to the labor Ticket file.

 

In either case, the reason code is not validated from the transaction file because there is no indirect transaction code. The indirect code that can be setup is machine downtime. If you need to validate and track indirect by reason and validate the reason code, then you may want to explore an MES solution that works with Infor LX.

 

10 Ways to Not Screw Up the OEE Project – It is More Important than You Think

Rich Grilli 0 34659 Article rating: 5.0


Is there a mandate in your company to increase OEE and it has landed on your plate? Ah yes, the OEE approach. You remember what that is right? The Overall Equipment Effectiveness  metric as developed in Japan during restoration made famous in crafting some serious efficiency. Well, someone in management has decided that this is the way to make his world better and now it’s up to you to make it happen.

But there are pitfalls along the way:

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Is Lot Control Necessary?

Anthony Etzel 0 62114 Article rating: No rating

Certain industries require lot control, where others may find it an option based on how they want to trace the material used in a product in the event of a defect, or recall.

LX provides tight lot controls and flexibility with lot number assignments. Shop orders can have a pre-assigned lot number, or a lot number can be automatically assigned when the item is produced. You can also assign a specific lot number for the entire shop order, or for each item/quantity reported against a shop order.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Default Order Frequency

Kathy Barthelt 0 63524 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 ERP 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.

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

This enhancement provides additional views, additional order and line details, improved navigation, and additional capabilities to the IDF Customer Order Inquiry cards and to customer order-related business objects such as Allocations, Customer Invoices, Inventory Transaction History, Promotions, Drop Shipments.

Enhanced Order views based on user roles such as customer service, warehouse/logistics, salesperson/commission, data analysis/management reporting

  • Improved sort, select and filter capabilities
  • Enhanced navigation, data organization and data display
  • Improved customer service access to all transactions throughout the entire customer order life cycle – from quote to order, related invoices, and any RMAs, return orders, related credit memos
  • Improved grouping of related fields
  • New cards to present additional order and order line details
  • Consolidation of cards and card details when appropriate
  • Enhanced Display and Maintain capabilities for drillback to related customer, ship-to, item, carrier, terms, and other master file details
  • Improved display of dates, times and applicable time zones when Region Code time zone support is implemented
  • Multi language Description, Name and Address fields displayed in user’s language, if defined, else in base language

This enhancement provides search capabilities on segment value description in Segment Value List window (WINGSVD).

Segment Value List (WINGSVD):

  • Converted to a standard subfile
  • New action code 10=Search

This makes it easier to locate segment values when defining segment values in Model Account Builder or Alias definition. In addition, WINGSVD has been redesigned as a subfile to enable WebTop grid capabilities.

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Tips: LN | Baan

George Moroses

Infor LX & BPCS Tip: PowerLink

PowerLink is a Windows-based client for end-users within the Infor Development Framework (IDF). PowerLink allows exports/imports from/to the ERP database, but how much do you really know about it? Here is some helpful information about PowerLink.​

Why does PowerLink sometimes fail to export all records?
There's not a finite amount of records that PowerLink can export. However, PowerLink export was never intended to handle large volumes of data. It was designed as a quick snapshot of a fairly small subset and a simple view of the user's PowerLink card. 

What is the maximum amount of data that can be exported?
The maximum number of records is only limited by the system resource like memory, etc. When the system runs out of resources, an OutOfMemory error should occur. In previous testings, we have exported +1 million records, although the size of records differs greatly between business objects, the total size of the data could be an issue. For larger volumes of data, customers should investigate other tools such as the iSeries Access "Data Transfer from iSeries Server" feature to download directly to Excel.

How do I know if the size of the data is an issue?
1. When exporting to an external file (text, HTML) then importing to Excel: You can easily check the output (text, HTML) to see if the intermediate output has all the records. This can be done by visual inspection or through the use of column totals. Simply compare between the output and what you see in PowerLink. If the exported file has all the records, then the problem is definitely Excel.
2. When exporting to clipboard, then copy/paste to Excel: There is a clipboard export size limit that is controlled through client preferences. Check the exported data in the clipboard, and see if it contains all the records or only partial records due to the size limitation set in client preferences. If limited, change the client preferences using Customize from the Main browser > Preferences > Miscellaneous tab > Limit Clipboard Export, and try the export again. If the clipboard has all the records the problem is in Excel, which we don't have jurisdiction over.

Suggestions for improving the export process. 

  1. Reduce the number of columns seen in the view. This will serve to reduce the data being exported and may increase the number of records that can be exported. 
     
  2. Reduce the complexity of the view. If the view has one column that lives on a related object, then it has to build SQL behind the scenes to get that related record. If all of the columns come from a single business object, then the processing will be significantly faster.
     
  3. Export to HTML, which can be opened directly by Excel, Access, and many other programs. This reduces the processing of the export formatting because PowerLink needs only to put begin and end tags around each data element. This will also preserve column alignment when Excel or other programs open the file.
     
  4. Unless you are exporting a fairly small volume of data, export to a file, not clipboard. Clipboard is held in memory until the entire view is read, and records are written to the file as they are retrieved.
     

 Also see KB 1357068 for more information about testing your view.

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