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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

Infor ERP Tip of the Week: 5 Steps to Managing Sales Tax

Infor LX | BPCS | Infor LN | Baan

Crossroads RMC 0 36064 Article rating: 5.0

The world of sales tax is constantly changing and can be extremely confusing, but getting it right is crucial to your company’s success. As your business evolves, your sales tax obligations may also change. Through it all, there are typically five steps involved in maintaining sales tax compliance. Review the steps below to understand your complete sales tax picture.

Step 1: Know where your business must collect...

Infor LN & Baan Tip: Defining “Unavailability” in Infor LN

Kathy Barthelt 0 29012 Article rating: 5.0

This topic describes the definition of temporary unavailability for resources in a calendar.

Use one of the following sessions:

  • Recurring unavailability
    For recurring unavailability, such as national holidays, define the recurrence in the Recurrences (tcccp0143m000) session. Add that recurrence to the applicable calendar and...

“Sorry, boss. We can’t help you move the business forward.”

Infor LX | BPCS | Infor LN | Baan

Crossroads RMC 0 17417 Article rating: 5.0

Imagine saying that to your boss, or the president of your company. What would their response be? Do you think they would say, “It’s ok, we can wait to save a ton of money and move us ahead of the competition... No problem... let me know when you have time to work on it.”  Pretty unlikely. Instead, they will want you to...

What you missed: Infor’s vision for the IBM i teams’ future alignment and focus – Register today!

Inforum

George Moroses 0 22513 Article rating: 5.0

What you missed at Inforum

Infor’s vision for the IBM i teams’ future alignment and focus – Register today!

February 8 | 11am CT / 12pm ET

Join this webinar to hear Jay Allison, Director of Sales, share some insight into Infor’s vision for the IBM i teams’ future alignment and focus. Also hear from David Rapacz, Product Manager for Infor LX, on what you may have missed at Inforum as well as some product updates.

Register today via the LX Community calendar.

Infor LN & Baan Tip: Porting Set Issues

Kathy Barthelt 0 60101 Article rating: 5.0

Are you on the latest porting set for your version of Baan or Infor LN?

Here are some issues you might run into if you stay on an old porting set too long:

  • Incompatibility because of operating system patches
  • Printing issues because of out-of-date libraries
  • Potential performance issues if binaries are not updated
  • Updating...

It’s mid-January and IT’S GO TIME!

Infor LX | BPCS | Infor LN | Baan

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The calendar is fresh, the resolutions are made and the opportunities are endless!

So, it is time to dive right in and start tackling your to-do’s?

Right??

...Not just yet!

First, you need to take the time to think about your ERP strategy.

What’s an ERP strategy?

Infor LX & BPCS Tip: What is IDF and Why Do I Need It?

George Moroses 0 27461 Article rating: 5.0

The Infor Development Framework (IDF) re-architects the way a user interacts with the application by providing an efficient, task-oriented process to view the application information that is contained within Infor LX. IDF enables users to configure their view of the application data without modifying the core application and its supportability.

The examples below describe how users can configure their display of data and maximize overall productivity:

  • Arrange application information into multiple groupings and sequences that make sense for the job.
  • Hide information that does not apply to a particular job or task.
  • Filter records to show only the information that applies to the job or task that the user is performing.
  • Customize the information for an individual user, for a group of users, or for all users.

To get more details on how IDF can benefit your company, please contact Anthony Etzel today!

Infor LN & Baan | Infor LX & BPCS Tip: Time for the dreaded three words?

Crossroads RMC 0 28392 Article rating: 5.0

Manual     Physical     Inventory

While it may be accurate (and I say MAY), is a Manual Physical Inventory the right way? Best practices would say absolutely not!

The better way is implementing Cycle Counting. Why Cycle Counting instead of a full physical inventory? With a cycle count, the count focuses on a selected range of stock that can be carried out in parallel with a company’s normal operations. Cycle Counts represent a streamlined method of inventory management to ensure less disruption on the business processes associated with receiving, consuming, or dispatching of stock. 

The “freeze” is no longer required, your staff doesn't need to work long hours over the holidays, and you get accurate inventory counts all year long! Crossroads RMC can help you implement Cycle Counting efficiently and painlessly, contact us today to get started. 800.762.2077

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

Tips: LN | Baan

Kathy Barthelt

Infor LN & Baan Manufacturing Tip: Performance Problems in Generate Order Planning (cprrp1210m000)

When the Generate Order Planning (cprrp1210m000) session is run it can take minutes to days to finish the process.

The performance of this session depends on many settings, like the number of plan items, the number of orders, but it also depends on hardware and database setup.

Here are some guidelines on how performance can be improved.

  • Be sure you are always on the latest solutions with the planning sessions. We are constantly improving the software to gain more speed in the Enterprise Planning (EP) sessions.
  • The number of planned items is critical. Try to reduce the number of planned items. Is it necessary that all items be planned via EP? For shop floor stock the TPOP or SIC replenish systems are often more suitable.
  • When you use PCS, be sure to close the projects when they are finished. When a PCS project has status Closed, the customized items will not be planned.

It's better to run Remove Plan Items for closed Projects (cprpd1220m000). This session removes the item planning data for customized items of closed projects.

  • If you run EP with the option, Also Generate Item Master Plan and/or Online Update Item Master Plan, consider if you need an Item Master Plan for all plan items. An Item Master Plan is usually meant for global long-term planning. Again this is not very useful for shop floor stock. Reducing the number of master-planned items improves performance.
  • When you use Resource Master Plans; are all your resources really critical? If a work center is not critical do not create a Resource Master Plan for it.
  • When using Item Master Plans and/or Resource Master Plans, set in Scenarios (cprpd4100m000) the total scenario length as short as possible. For example, if your sales order horizon is 2 years, a scenario end date which is 3 years after the current date is sufficient. During the calculations of the Item Master Plan and the Resource Master, all periods defined in the scenario are checked and calculated. So if you have the end date of the scenario on 2038, EP will do the calculations (for every master-planned item) until 2038.

Defining a rolling scenario will keep your scenario length constant and you don’t have to worry that you run beyond your scenario's end date.

  • Updating the pegging relations has a serious impact on the EP performance. In EP Parameters (cprpd0100m000) you can set the Pegging Horizon in days. Keep this horizon as short as possible. The Update Signals by Item/Planner option also has some impact, but less than the pegging.
  • EP uses the so-called phase numbers to detect the lowest level in which an item is used within a BOM structure or in a supplying relation. If the phase numbers are not ‘up-to-date’, EP will correct the phase numbers during the planning. This takes time during the planning run. If there are loops in BOMs or in supplying relations, this recalculation has a big impact on the performance. Therefore you could run Compute Phase Numbers (cprpd6200m000) on a regular basis. For example once a month. Always run this session with the Generate Report option selected. If loops are detected these are reported. Be sure to solve all the reported errors.
  • When unexpected results occur, especially when the data is imported from external packages, always check the number of records in tables cprpd100 and cprpd120. The number of records should match! Remark: From 10.4 onwards the table cprpd120 has become obsolete so this point not applicable anymore.
  • The number of calendars also impacts planning performance. Then for every warehouse, work center, or BP, and so on, a different calendar is defined. Planning has to read all of these calendars from start to end. This can have a huge impact on performance.
    • If you link a calendar to a work center or warehouse, avoid defining a new calendar for every work center/warehouse. Try to link the same calendar to more than one department.
    • Define the start of the calendar close to the start date of the scenario. For example, the current date is 01-07-2014, the start date of the scenario is 365 days in the past. So a start date for your calendar could be 01-07-2012.
    • Define the end date of the calendar not too far in the future. Depending on the end date of the scenario you could use 5 years ahead.  For example, the current date is 01-07-2014, the end date of the scenario is 3 years in the future. So an end date for your calendar could be 01-07-2022. Do not define an end date past 19-01-2038, which is the last UTC date Infor LN can handle.

Also, the interaction with the database can have a big impact on performance. 
A commonly used way to improve the total run time of the EP run is to start the session in parallel processing. 
See also Knowledge Base Article 22881401 Performance, Tracing and tuning Guide, for more details.

These guidelines are just some hints, and a good starting point because performance is a complex issue.

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Kathy Barthelt

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