Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Month End – Miscellaneous To-Do’s

Kathy Barthelt / Tuesday, March 3, 2015 0 103170 Article rating: No rating

Print Sales Order History Information
- all invoices processed through sales
Check Inventory Valuation
- this should tie out to your inventory accounts
Print Integration Information
- see all postings from WIP to finished goods

Print G/L Transaction Information
- print specific transaction types for any GL account

Print Lot Control Information
- will show where serial numbers were used

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: What is Lean Make to Order?

Anthony Etzel / Tuesday, February 24, 2015 0 80774 Article rating: No rating

This is a simple way to go from the customer order to making the order and shipping the order. It involves a few simple steps:

Receive and enter the customer order
Automatic credit review
Automatic release of the shop order tied to the customer order
Issue material, report labor to the production order receipt
Pick the order, ship the order, invoice the customer

With lean, you can skip processing the demand through MRP. You can go directly from the customer order to the shop order creation.

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

Kathy Barthelt / Tuesday, February 24, 2015 0 175150 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.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Top Down Shop Order Schedule

Anthony Etzel / Tuesday, February 17, 2015 0 80622 Article rating: No rating

In ERP LX, this function is called Backward Scheduling. This is a simple, easy way to create and release shop orders associated with the end item.

The result is a shop calendar with the associated order start dates. Setting up ERP LX properly with correct Queue Times, Setup and Run Times, along with Move Times, will result in accurate shop order start dates.

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Back Dating Cycling Counting Orders

Kathy Barthelt / Tuesday, February 17, 2015 0 110044 Article rating: No rating

Cycle Count Orders cannot be directly “back dated” in Baan IV, Baan V or LN, however, there are some work-arounds.

In Baan IV you can do an inventory adjustment and back date. Just set all dates on the adjustment to the date you want and Baan will post the adjustment in that period.

In LN you can do a Cycle Count/ Adjustment and again back date and Baan will post to that period.

Unfortunately, there is no work-around for Baan V.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Day: Inventory Management

Anthony Etzel / Wednesday, February 11, 2015 0 78882 Article rating: No rating

Establishing the Quantity On-Hand and the Quantity Available.

LX maintains buckets for information associated with the following inventory transactions for each item:

Opening Balance
Issues
Receipts
Adjustments
Allocations for the Customer
Allocations for Manufacturing

The on hand quantity does not include any allocations. To arrive at the on hand quantity, start with the opening balance, less any issues, plus any receipts, then add or subtract any adjustments. Available inventory is the on-hand less any allocations.

Baan/LN Tip of the Day: Chart of Accounts

Kathy Barthelt / Wednesday, February 11, 2015 0 124543 Article rating: No rating

Zero sublevel accounts are posting level accounts. All others are parent accounts. Once the balances have been updated in the child ledger accounts, the parents are automatically updated.

Inquiries and reports can be printed or displayed either by child accounts or by parent accounts. On line drill-down is possible from either child or parent.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Day: Cycle Counting Part 2

Anthony Etzel / Thursday, February 5, 2015 0 80388 Article rating: No rating

Understanding: The Cycle Count Alternative

The best way to cycle count is to count the same number of items each day and at the same time each day. The goal is to count your “A” items 4 times a year. The “A” items should be those item that are about 80% of the total inventory value and 20% of the total items. Consider creating your own cycle count schedule then instead of using the cycle count transaction, use the inventory adjustment transaction. The item balance is changed at the time the transaction is keyed. The transaction list can be used for the reconciliation process.

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Tips: LX | BPCS | M3

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/ Categories: Because I Care, Analytics Dashboard

Dashboards vs. Reports – What do they offer and which do I need?

Companies are collecting oceans of data, and struggle with transforming it into usable information. Most businesses focus on two methods of sharing data - the report and the dashboard. While these two terms mean many things to many people, it is important to understand what these terms mean and how the report and dashboard have similar features but they are not the same thing.

What is a Report?

A report is meant to be used to gather detailed intelligence on the operations within an organization, thus a report can be either very broadly covering a wide scope of related information, or narrowly focusing on details of a single item, purpose, or event. All of this information, while presented in a report, is meant to be a snapshot in time.

Quite often, a report is built within the ERP system itself and often is constrained by the graphical and user limitations within the ERP. More often than not, large amounts of data are exported to Excel where added features allow for better manipulation of the data to a format that is digestible by users. Regardless, the data is only valid for that moment and time.

What is a Dashboard?

A dashboard is a graphical interface that provides at-a-glance views revolving around answering a central question. For example, an executive may ask you for up-to-the-minute details on "how the business is doing?". The answer to that question is as complex as the organizational structure of the company, but it is probably very simply measured with approximately 10 metrics. Those 10 metrics can likely be analyzed in chart form, and can and should be combined into one chart when the numbers are relatable or are on a similar scale. All these things should be considered when building a dashboard.

Dashboards, similar to the one in your vehicle, display critical data. Imagine driving down the road and having to push a bunch of buttons to find out how much fuel you have left, or having to pull over and pop the hood to check the oil pressure. It would be dangerous and a waste of your precious time. Your car's control panel or dashboard displays the most crucial information in an easy-to-use, graphical way.

How do Dashboards and Reports differ?

First, a report contains much more detailed information. Where a dashboard might provide a CEO with information on how the entire company’s sales are progressing, a corresponding report will give the CFO or VP of Sales the ability to see how each sales region or even salesperson is performing and make leadership decisions. Just like responsibility, data will get more granular as the organizational hierarchy goes down. The C-Suite might be interested in the detailed data, but for seeing a snapshot of high-level information, the dashboard is the desired mode.

Second, a report is much longer than a dashboard. Not only in the amount of detail but also visually. Tables and charts that live within a report can take up many pages. Furthermore, a report will likely require the reader to scroll through many screens or click from page to page.

A dashboard should confine its display to a single screen with no need for scrolling or switching among multiple screens. Something powerful happens when we see things together, all within eye span. Likewise, something critical is compromised when we lose sight of some data by scrolling or switching to another screen to see other data.

When an individual dashboard has so much information on it that scrolling is required, the power of the dashboard is diminished because the information that lives there is intended to be viewed together. Each piece of information on the dashboard is meant to give the reader the ability to answer part of the central question of the dashboard. These charts combine to answer the question, so if the reader can’t see them together, making them work together is much more difficult.

To sum it up, a report is a more detailed collection of tables, charts, and graphs and it is used for a much more detailed, full analysis while a dashboard is used for monitoring what is going on. The behavior of the pieces that make up dashboards and reports are similar, but their makeup itself is different. A dashboard answers a question in a single view and a report provides information. Put in another way, the report can provide a more detailed view of the information that is presented on a dashboard.

With dashboards, you can empower your entire team with data insights in real-time information, so your data is never stale. Users can create and share custom views of your data on the fly, in minutes.

With powerful Dashboards, you can:

Create pie charts, graphs, interactive maps, and more with just a few clicks.
Build a dashboard once and make it instantly available on any device.
Tell a story with your data with your own custom layouts, colors, and commentary—all with no coding and changes available instantly to users.
Know you always have current reports with real-time data updates.
Access your dashboards from anywhere–computer, tablet, or phone.