Two big sources of inefficiencies in manufacturing are paper and spreadsheets. I know that you love ‘em, but they are the cause of more problems than you probably realize. Think of how long it takes you to get paper based data into the hands of those who can do something valuable with the data. Are you capturing all of the information correctly? Timely? What about those spreadsheets? Can everyone access that information across your organization? Is that data married with all of the related data regarding your operations to give your executive and middle management the information they need when they need it?

Make your shop floor paperless and put in place systems that talk to one another and automatically pull and push data to and from your ERP so that you can look in one place for all the information you need to run your business effectively.

If you’re not doing this today, you might as well be burning money.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are you doing these things every month?

• Print financial project transactions
• Print report showing all deliveries with revenue for projects
• Print cost/revenue by project
• Print cost information by project

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:

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.