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

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...

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...

The planning data for the method of manufacturing is defined in Routing. A routing consists of operations, with each operation identifying the last to be carried out in a work center and/or on a certain machine defined for a specific site.

Routings can be as follows:

• Standard Routing - A generic routing that can be attached to multiple items
• Item specific - A routing that is applied to one item
• Network routing - A routing containing sequentially ordered operations and parallel operations
• Order quantity dependent routing - A routing that is defined for a specific quantity of items

You use the Routing module to record routings for manufactured items. You can define the following:

Operations are automatically backward scheduled at shop order release time. The backward scheduling algorithm starts with the shop order due date and schedules each operation based upon the standard move and queue times in the routings and the number of days the job is expected to run at standard. The system calculates and stores the operation scheduled start date. The dates may be modified by the shop order maintenance program. The number of days that a job is expected to run an operation is dependent upon the available capacity for that work center and the total hours scheduled for that operation.

The backward scheduling algorithm also considers...

The Infor Development Framework (IDF) re-architects the way a user interacts with the application. IDF provides an efficient, task-oriented process to view 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 improve performance and reduce database growth, deleting records is highly effective. The disadvantage of deleting records is that data is no longer available. Usually, however, not all records need to be saved. For example, line activities are stored by warehouse. Normally, you do not need to keep these records. Therefore, after closing a warehouse order, line activities can be removed. The User's Guide for ERP LN Archiving and the corresponding Baan IV/V Guides describe several sessions you can use to delete old data. Other data such as items and business partners can be reviewed once in a while, after which you can delete the data you no longer need. For every order and contract table, a session is available to archive and delete old orders. In these sessions, you can specify several characteristics to select the orders to be removed, such as date or status. Run these sessions on a regular basis.

After a week of blocking the Suez Canal, the now-famous cargo ship, Ever Given has been freed from the 27,000 cubic meters of sand and mud that were surrounding the ship. Supply chains are flowing again. I for one am very glad to hear that the ship has been freed since coffee, toilet paper and a whole host of other items were being held up! In all seriousness, it was and is a crisis that will have ripple effects on the global economy.

As I often do, I started to relate this crisis to the world of ERP that we live in. Although we are not responsible for dealing with a situation like what happened in the Suez Canal, we all deal with problems in our jobs every day. Some of these problems are small, and some are not so small. Some problems are caused by human error, some by prevailing winds that blow us in a particular direction, and some by circumstances out of our control. It is what we do about the problems we encounter that make all the difference. We could bury our heads and hope the problems somehow go away on their own, or we can take action and do something to bring about the change necessary to get past the blockage.

I see “blockages” every day in working with my customers. Sometimes it is a lack of understanding of best practices in a given department, or a reliance on tribal knowledge that determines how and why something is done in the system, or inefficient manual processes destroying a company’s efficiency, or hundreds (or thousands) of customizations standing in the way of an upgrade, or employees labeling an ERP system as “no longer a fit” when their company is only using 10% of the available functionality in the system.

So, maybe today we could focus on what it would take to remove the “blockage” that we have in our way. What benefits could we realize if we worked together to bring about incremental change? Could we actually get that upgrade done? Could we start operating based on industry-leading best practices? Could we increase our market share? Could we decrease our costs and boost our revenue? All of this is possible.

Contact me today so that we can begin to work together to solve the problems that stand in the way of your progress.

solutions@crossroadsrmc.com or 800.762.2077