Just-in-Time (JIT) is a management philosophy that focuses on minimizing the resources necessary to add value to your products and to operate your factory in ways that eliminate waste. Resources are labor, materials, equipment, space, and time. Waste is anything that does not add value to your products. Moving work-in-process from place to place, stacking and sorting, investing capital in large work-in-process and raw material inventories, inspecting materials at your vendors' sites, and tying up warehouse space with finished goods are all activities that add cost, not value, to your products. 

JIT is a process that reduces lead time. JIT does not replace an MRP, an inventory program, a scheduling technique to bypass your Master Schedule, or a materials management project. JIT is the never-ending commitment of everyone, from top management to your workers on the floor, to maximize your effectiveness through continuous, incremental improvements.

In LN, the configuration of a generic item not always results into a customized item. Configured items can now be customized items as well as standard items. If users configure items without PCS projects, standard items are generated instead of customized items.

 

The sessions for generating product variant structures for sales quotations and sales orders are moved from the Product Configuration module in Manufacturing to the Sales Control module in LN. The following new sessions are available in Sales Control:

▪ Generate (Budget) Structure for Sales Quotations (tdsls1201m100).

▪ Generate (Project) Structure for Sales Orders (tdsls4244m000)

To create and maintain shop orders use SFC500 Shop Order Entry Maintenance. These orders use the standard bill of material (BOM) as the base list of components. You can also set up standard routings, which list the operations,

or work steps, involved in manufacturing.

 

To release shop orders, use the Shop Order Release program, SFC505. Infor ERP LX groups shop orders by user ID for batch processing. Use Shop Packet Print, SFC520, to print the shop orders that you select. SFC530 allows you to create multi-level shop orders to link shop orders together with a common end item parent. Linking multiple shop orders together for a final assembly product provides support for make-to-order and engineer-to-order manufacturing environments which need to schedule these multiple orders together or as a vertical slice in the production schedule.

 

You can make changes to shop orders after you print them. Use Shop Order Entry/Maintenance, SFC500, to update the shop orders. Changes are immediately visible on the inquiry screens for SFC300 and SFC350. To reprint the shop packet, use Reprint Shop Packet, SFC560.

Service departments and warehouses that contain spare parts and components used for service and maintenance belong to enterprise units. To perform separate financial accounting for the service departments and their warehouses, you can assign service departments and warehouses to enterprise units that are linked to different financial companies.

 

If material, labor, or other costs are transferred between service departments and warehouses, or from one service department to another (in the case of internal subcontracting for depot repair), LN can perform the invoicing between these departments and warehouses. In the Enterprise Modeling Management module, you can define internal trade relationships with invoicing between various entities.

 

You can also record and process service operations in a multi-logistic company environment.

The system automatically performs offsets for requirements dates for components in the MPS/MRP calculations. It also performs offsets for calculation of material need dates at the time that shop orders are released.

To calculate the offset, the system takes the parent lead time from the Item Master and adjusts it by the bill of materials offset (plus or minus) for the component. This gives the lead time days for that specific component. The system starts with the due date of the parent and backs up and skips all non-work days in the shop calendar.

Note that the offset calculation uses only calendar records that have a blank work center (the calendar record applies to all work centers). See the information for the Shop Calendar Maintenance program SFC140, in your Shop Floor Control documentation for shop calendar details.

Tax reporting is part of the financial accounting and is restricted to one country. Therefore, the LN tax handling in a multi-company structure is similar to the tax handling in a single company environment.

Tax handling in LN includes the following:

· Tax registration

For tax registration, you define the various tax details for each country in the Taxation module. In the General Ledger module of Financials, you specify the ledger accounts for the tax amounts separately for each financial company. LN can post the tax amounts calculated for a tax code to different ledger accounts in the individual financial companies, for example, in a single logistic, multi-financial company structure.

You can integrate Accounts Payable (ACP) with Purchasing. ACP requires more detailed information in the Vendor file than Purchasing requires. Accounts Payable automatically checks for a valid purchase order when you

match invoices to POs and receipts. Enter any outstanding active purchase orders through PO Release, PUR500, before you can match invoices in Accounts Payable.

 

Accounts Payable can also update the Actual Cost fields in the Inventory Master file directly from vendor invoices. You must provide the following information in order for Accounts Payable to complete this update:

▪ Define a type C inventory transaction.

▪ Enter a valid purchase order on the Invoice Entry header screen, ACP500D2-01, or in the Next Purchase Order field on the Invoice Entry: PO Costing screen, ACP500D3-01.

▪ Enter the information for the actual cost transaction on the appropriate lines.

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: