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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 Week: How To Capture Re-Work Time (Part 1)

Anthony Etzel 0 72465 Article rating: No rating
In SFC600, there is no code to capture the time spent on re-work. Re-work is usually at a specific operation, or when the part is finished and QC determines that re-work is required in order to pass inspection. You are faced with deciding on how to report the additional labor time.

Do you continue to report it against the operation, or create a re-work shop order?

If you are re-working through a specific operation you can capture the time as run labor with the SFC600 program. Now you need to deal with the variance of actual to standard time and what impact this has on costing.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Configuration Management

Anthony Etzel 0 68676 Article rating: No rating

Make to Order? No problem if you use the Configuration Management System. This LX product allows you to define and configure a make to order product during Customer Order Entry. Basically, you have the option to create different products under the same common product item. You will get two completely different common end items that are configured from the same common parent.

The customer orders are planned and turned into shop orders for each end item with all the associated components. With an MES solution in place, the shop order side is easy to schedule and allows you to manage the shop floor.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Product Configurator - Part 1

Kathy Barthelt 0 69281 Article rating: No rating
What is it?
The configurator consists of a set of features (questions). The options (answers) to these questions then are used to generate the custom bill of material and routing. These questions may be answered at the time of order entry, prior to order entry (in a project or quote) or after order entry (in the project). The order of the questions need not have any relationship to the bill of materials. The configurator may also calculate the selling price, create a unique “smart” item number, custom description and text. Simple rules are used to interpret the answers.

Who uses the configurator?
Companies whose products have options. The configurator eliminates the need for part numbers for all combinations of options. The configurator ensures that the pricing and bills are correct. The configurator also keeps statistics on the frequency the options are selected.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Uses for LX Bill of Material

Anthony Etzel 0 79294 Article rating: No rating
In Infor LX, based on how your items are set up and on how you structure the Bill of Material, the following are some usages of a bill of material by functioning area:

  • Engineering & QA – change control, product design and specifications
  • Manufacturing – build instructions , material pick lists
  • Accounting – product costing
  • Materials Inventory – material and inventory planning
  • Sales – customer order processing
  • Production Scheduling – item scheduling (also a component of an MES solution)

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

Kathy Barthelt 0 65955 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.

Why Your Operation Doesn’t Stand a Chance in Hell of Going From Good to Great (and What to do About it)

David Dickson 0 97706 Article rating: 5.0

You dream of building a manufacturing powerhouse.

An operation with loads of throughput, profit, and efficiency in every process to make your products the best quality you can make them.

You want to be as successful as the factories and companies they write about in books like  Good to Great, changing your operation, and even motivating and inspiring your teams to do so too.

But you know you haven’t got a chance in hell of seeing that kind of success unless you can truly change and make significant differences over the long haul.

Of course, the big question is How? 

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Indirect Labor Reporting

Anthony Etzel 0 69827 Article rating: No rating
In the Shop Floor Control Module, you have the ability to key in both direct labor and indirect labor. However you want to establish specific types (reasons) for the indirect labor. The SFC600 labor entry program shows a reason code field, but it is designed for reject quantity and machine downtime reasons, not indirect labor reasons.

There is a way around this. With an MES solution you have the ability to setup and report indirect time against a specific reason code.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Configuring Items in Infor LN

Kathy Barthelt 0 82886 Article rating: No rating

In Infor 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.

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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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