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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: Closed, Final Closed, Provisional Close – What’s The Difference?

Kathy Barthelt 0 77282 Article rating: No rating

Fiscal, Reporting and Tax Periods can have status Open, Closed or Final Closed. If a period is Closed or Final Closed, you cannot post entries to those periods. If a period is Closed, you can re-set it to Open and post entries. If a period is Final Closed, you cannot post and you cannot set it back to Closed or Open.

A Provisional Close is run at year-end to bring the balances forward for the new year without having to close the previous year. A Provisional Close can be run as many times as you like. After a Final Close, a Provisional Close cannot be run.

The Provisional Close allows you to continue into the new year with all financial reporting and not have to rush with the Final Close until all adjusting entries are made and any final signoffs have been completed.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Product Families

Kathy Barthelt 0 77014 Article rating: No rating

In Baan IVC, plan items on the lowest plan level were automatically actual items (not product families). All plan items on higher plan levels were product families.

The relationship between a product family and items on lower plan levels was defined in a planning bill of material.

In Infor LN, every family item must be defined in the Item Base Data module. A family item can exist on any plan level. The relationship between a family item and items on lower plan levels is defined in aggregation relationships.

Aggregation relationships in Infor LN are much more flexible than the planning bills of material in Baan IV. For example, users can define aggregation relationships between items on the same plan level.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Create the Master Schedule

Anthony Etzel 0 79232 Article rating: No rating

In the master schedule creation, you have the flexibility to enter a planning start date, or default to the facility planning start date. Infor LX uses the planning date to plan both orders with forecasts and customer orders as demand.You can create your master schedule from the Master Production Scheduling module (MPS).

No one cares how hard you work! How you can do more, while doing less – know your MO.

David Dickson 0 56424 Article rating: 5.0

Would you like me to tell you a dirty, little secret?

No one cares how hard you work. Sure, some people will notice if you seem to be working hard. Your spouse or companion might note that you seem tired, stressed, not as much fun, or just aren’t around much, but they care about the consequences, not how hard you work. Your boss might note happily that his staff seems busy, things are humming along, but you can be sure that when it is review time she gets no credit for “keeps staff very busy.” Nor will the boss give you extra points for being busy. It is about results.

People outside your personal life, beyond your coworkers, might notice that you are hard to contact, perhaps because you are so busy. But trust me, customers do not care why they can’t get hold of you, and they will not see it as a positive.

Infor and Crossroads RMC are proud to offer a joint webinar on Taking Your Shop Floor Paperless - August 28th, 2014.

Anthony Etzel 0 45849 Article rating: No rating

Taking Your Shop Floor Paperless - Webinar, August 28th, 2014.

During this webinar, you will learn about the Crossroads MES Shop Floor Solution which gives you the ability to do all the following and more:

  • Collect production data
  • Provide real time feedback to your workers and your management team
  • Integrate to machines on your shop floor to pull counts directly
  • Provide up-to-date electronic versions of shop floor paperwork at the work center
  • Monitor your production against your key performance indicators
     

Join us on Thursday, August 28th at 12:00 p.m. Eastern to learn more.

TO REGISTER:

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Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Company Calendar

Kathy Barthelt 0 75520 Article rating: No rating

Baan uses the company calendar in the following modules to determine the start and end dates for planned orders:

  • Master Production Scheduling
  • Material Requirements Planning
  • Capacity Requirements Planning (All three combined in a single planning module for Baan V and LN)
  • Shop Floor Control

The calendar provides the valid working days, number of shifts per day and the number of hours in a day.

Baan allows for a single calendar for the whole company or for a calendar for each work center.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: SFC600 & SFC650

Anthony Etzel 0 87412 Article rating: No rating

These programs are used to capture and post shop floor information. Labor reporting, machine time, etc. can be captured by either program. The key difference is that one will also capture the production receipt and backflush components. Based on your company information / transaction process, one of these programs will most likely be used daily to capture current shop floor data. You can use the shop packet labor ticket for the manual recording, and the keying of the data. Alternatively, you can incorporate an automated method like an MES solution to capture the data and streamline the process.

Crossroads RMC to Exhibit at Manufacturing Matchmaking 2014

Crossroads RMC 0 45332 Article rating: No rating
Crossroads RMC will exhibit at the inaugural Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center (IMEC) Manufacturing Matchmaking Event 2014 on September 23, 2014. Manufacturers from across the state of Illinois will come together at this event to discuss ways to improve the productivity and competitiveness of Illinois' small and mid-sized manufacturing firms.
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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

David Dickson

If ERP is plumbing for the Enterprise - How do we unplug it and keep it from making a huge mess?

I have been working with ERP in various roles for over 30 years, directly involved in over a hundred implementations, while my company has been involved with over 300 more. Of course, in many ways the systems we use today are completely different from what we used in the ‘80s – back then it was green screens, simple transaction entry forms, and cumbersome updates (at best) to link what one department did with all the other areas that needed access to that information. Then there were those planning programs that took all the information along with various parameters the users needed to set and told us what to do.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

What has surely changed is how we use these systems. Back when I started we used them because we could process more transactions more accurately and faster with a computer, than with the otherwise necessary roomful of clerks. Those clerks, schedulers, and various other clerical employees were the first generation of jobs computers rendered obsolete. Strangely, I do not remember anyone bemoaning those lost jobs. I will let others speculate on the reasons for that.

Individual companies could and did debate the decision about how much they automated. Yes, in retrospect, it is pretty clear that choosing not to automate was to accept a long, slow death for the business, but it is not that long ago when there were still lots of manufacturing managers and business owners who did not use, or like, computers.

Competition Changes Everything

Today a business system is just another piece of necessary infrastructures like an office, a phone, a lawyer, a bank account, and an accountant. The system remains the transaction processing backbone for the organization, but the way in which we use the information that flows from those transactions has changed drastically in this interconnected world. Back in the heady days when ERP was new, the focus was all internal, inside the four walls. Today that seems quaint – the Internet connects all systems and much of the unique incremental benefits (or competitive advantage, if you prefer) come from two deceptively simple concepts – how you connect with the rest of the world from your business systems, and how you monitor your business’s performance in real-time and adapt to what you learn.

I still remember a kickoff meeting twenty years ago for what was then a pretty large ERP implementation at an automotive supplier. Two comments struck me – the first was public. “I like to think of our business as a boat, and we have been steering it by looking out the back. This project will at least let us see out the sides.” The other was in a private meeting when we were discussing change management, and how they would deal with the resistance that would surely come. This same manager said simply, “I guess we will have to fire someone for it, and then the rest will get religion.”

Not terribly ambitious goals, but I give him credit for honesty.

Things have certainly changed a lot in terms of our expectations for the systems, and our approach to implementation, but despite these systems have become an integral and necessary part of the infrastructure of every business, they remain infuriatingly complex and the benefits we expect are often difficult to achieve.

Illusive Benefits = Bad Form

That should not be the case. My goal is to be your guide and share my insights and other good ideas, found across the web, as to how to make business system selection easier and how to get the most benefit from those systems. Because in spite of all the marketing folderol, it seems pretty clear that your friendly software vendor and expert implementation consultants are not going to do that for you. Not because they are stupid or evil people, of course, quite the contrary. They just cannot and will not make the decisions for us that need to be made.

Systems should work for us. Choosing and implementing a system should not be a high-risk proposition for a business, or the individuals doing the work.

The common elements made simple, efficient, and effortless with returns.

My entire career has been dedicated to those goals.

What do you consider yourself to be?

  • internal expert?
  • someone beginning the search and implementation process?
  • an executive looking for a competitive advantage?
  • an industry insider?
  • or someone who finds this amusing for some reason?

All of the above? There is a better way to choose and use software and as someone who could fit into any and all of the categories listed (yes, I really do find business software entertaining in some weird way), I have some ideas I’d love to share with you, so feel free to ask questions.

About the author:

David Dickson is an itinerant generalist; his path to partner and CFO of Crossroads RMC has had its twists and turns. His first twist occurred when an employer needed a business system and picked him because he had three semesters of computer programming in engineering school -- an “expert” born. Somewhere along the line he helped to build and sell a company, which he bought back a couple of years later. Add in another acquisition, a merger, and about 30 years in manufacturing systems in various roles, and you might get a sense from where his real expertise might arise.

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Tips: LN | Baan

Companies can decide to involve a subcontractor and subcontract part of their activities. The subcontractor carries out the work and returns the products to your company.

In Infor LN, subcontracting is considered as purchasing labor from a third party. Therefore, if a manufacturer wants to subcontract work, he must generate a purchase order to start the subcontracting process. These are the types of subcontracting:

  • Subcontracting with material flow
    • Operation subcontracting: For operation subcontracting, a part of the production process (one or more operations) is subcontracted.
    • Item subcontracting: For item subcontracting, an item's entire production process is subcontracted. Therefore, it is always used with material flow support.
  • Subcontracting without material flow: The simplest form of subcontracting is to generate a subcontracting purchase order to record the operations outsourced to a subcontractor. The subcontracting purchase order only represents the administrative handling of the subcontracting process. When the subcontracted item is received back from the subcontractor, you must close the subcontracting purchase order, which initiates the production process.
  • Unplanned subcontracting: Unplanned subcontracting is applicable when you subcontract after generating a production order. For unplanned subcontracting, a purchase order is generated from the production order and the material supply lines are populated by Shop Floor Control.
  • Service subcontracting: For service subcontracting, work on an item to be maintained or repaired is subcontracted. This work entails the entire repair process, or only a part of it. Service subcontracting can be used with or without material flow support.

To start the subcontracting process, a purchase order is required.

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