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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 LX & BPCS Tip: Drop Shipments

George Moroses 0 28518 Article rating: 5.0

Infor LX provides a tightly integrated drop shipment processing capability. The product supports the creation, tracking, and management of customer drop shipment orders via the Order Management, Purchasing, and Billing applications.

The order processing professional initiates drop shipments during customer order creation. You can designate any order line for drop shipment if it meets user-defined drop ship controls. If you designate a line as a drop ship line, the system automatically creates a drop ship request in purchase order processing.

When a buyer responds to a drop ship request...

Top 10 Things You Might Not Know About Crossroads RMC

Crossroads RMC 0 27488 Article rating: 5.0
  1. Crossroads RMC has been in business since 1984 & has been an  partner since 1991. 
     
  2. Crossroads RMC offers functional & technical training on all versions of Infor LX, BPCS, Infor LN, and Baan and will completely tailor the training to your specific needs. 
     
  3. Many of our consultants are 🎵 musically inclined, so you might have the added benefit of some entertainment while your ERP problems are being solved!
     
  4. Our consultants have expert level functional & technical knowledge of every version of Infor LN & Baan from Triton 2.X through LN 10.7., and Infor LX & BPCS from BPCS 3.0 to LX 8.4!  💡
     
  5. Crossroads RMC is a value-added reseller of data collection equipment (mobile computers, printers, RFID equipment, and more).
     
  6. Our headquarters are just outside of Chicago, but for some silly reason, our East Coast staff thinks they have the best pizza.🍕
     
  7. Our integration specialists have developed close to 50 different integrations to Infor LN, Baan, Infor LX & BPCS.
     
  8. Crossroads RMC offers 24 X 7 support to all of our customers. 💪
     
  9. Our technical consultants have developed many Infor ERP software add-on solutions like MES, Data Collection, an Analytics Dashboard, FedEx / UPS integration, and more that are used by thousands of Infor users every day.
     
  10. We’ve been publishing Infor LN, Infor LX, BPCS, and Baan tips & tricks since February 2010, and most are still available on our website, with new ones being added every other week!

Infor LX & BPCS Tip: PowerLink

George Moroses 0 52225 Article rating: 5.0

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?...

Infor LN & Baan Tip: Job Management

Kathy Barthelt 0 122925 Article rating: 5.0

You can use job management to schedule jobs based on your organizational requirements. For example, you can schedule jobs at non-peak hours to improve the overall system performance in a heavily loaded environment. A job consists of one or more sessions or shell commands, or both, that run without user interaction. The sessions and shell commands in a job can be started while you are not logged on to the ERP system. You can schedule jobs to start processes periodically, at a defined interval, or immediately. Typically, you use job management for print and processing sessions.

Job data  - To create a job, you must specify basic job data and link sessions or shell commands, or both, to the job. In the basic job data, you specify whether the job is periodical. For periodical jobs, you specify how the job will be scheduled.

Shared job data tables  - Typically, each company stores its own basic job data. As a result, a job runs for a particular company. However, in a job, you can also run sessions in more than one company. You can run sessions in multiple companies when the job data tables of the associated companies are physically mapped to a single main company.

Job execution - Jobs can be started in multiple ways. The job’s status defines how you can start the job. You can start the job if the job’s status is In Queue or Free.

Job history -  When the execution of a job stops, for example, when the job completes successfully or when a runtime error occurs, information is written to a history log. The job history contains information, such as the date and time of the execution and the reasons why the job and its associated session ended.

Infor LN & Baan Materials Tip: Sales Quotations

Kathy Barthelt 0 67143 Article rating: 5.0

Sales quotations are used to supply a sold-to business partner with the required details to make a purchasing decision.

You can create a sales quotation in response to a request for quotation (RFQ) from a business partner, or as a sales tool to initiate the sales process with potential business partners. A quotation includes the dates, terms, items, or item descriptions to be sold, and a success percentage, which reflects the level of certainty that the quotation will be accepted. Sales quotations are included in the planning modules based on their success percentages. Quotations with a high success percentage are considered as sold.

You can print and send quotations to business partners. You can specify the results of the returned quotations in Sales. If the quotation is not accepted, you can...

Infor LX & BPCS Materials Tip of the Week: Drop Shipments

George Moroses 0 29273 Article rating: 5.0

Infor LX provides a tightly integrated drop shipment processing capability. The product supports the creation, tracking, and management of customer drop shipment orders via the Order Management, Purchasing, and Billing applications.

The order processing professional initiates drop shipments during customer order creation. You can designate any order line for drop shipment if it meets user-defined drop-ship controls. If you designate a line as a drop-ship line, the system automatically creates a drop-ship request in purchase order processing.

When a buyer responds to a drop-ship request and creates a purchase order, Infor LX

Infor LX & BPCS Finance Tip: AR Aging

George Moroses 0 28779 Article rating: 5.0

An ACR system parameter allows you to specify whether to measure invoice age from the date on which you create the invoice, invoice date, or the date on which the invoice is due. You can set up a separate terms code for each customer on the system to set the basic terms of payment for that customer. For example, this term could specify the number of days an invoice can be due before it is considered past due and the number of days that a discount is available. The system uses the terms code data to...

Infor LN & Baan Finance Tip: What Can You Do in the Financial Statements Module?

Kathy Barthelt 0 67837 Article rating: 5.0

In the Financial Statements module, you can:

  • Define financial statements, and link a structure of child statement accounts and parent statement accounts to these financial statements.
  • Link ledger accounts and/or dimensions to the statement accounts.
  • Link cash flow reasons to cash flow statement accounts.
  • Export financial data to FST reporting tables.
  • Print reports directly, or use the BIRT report functionality to print to PDF, HTML, and export to Excel or Word.


Data drill down in financial statements - You can...

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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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