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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 of the Week: Trim Leading Zero

George Moroses 0 61153 Article rating: 5.0

In LX 8.4, an enhancement has been included to allow for the expanded Company fields to have the leading zero truncated.

To trim leading zeros, CEA515B is called during macro resolution to trim the leading zero based on the position in the Zero Trim file (GZT). The Zero Trim file contains all the company number fields currently defined in the CEA Cross Reference fie (GXM).

This enhancement provides year over year comparison in financial reports and eliminates the need to setup new companies in programs such as Alias Definition. Financial programs trim the leading zero on Company fields, such as Company 010, on subsystem transactions to process as Company 10 during CEA macro resolution. Clients who prefer to retain the Company value as 010 on financial reports can clear the GZT file.

Infor LN & Baan Add-ons: Need a reason why you should barcode your inventory? How about 8 reasons!

Kathy Barthelt 0 34103 Article rating: 5.0

Top Eight Benefits of Barcodes

Barcodes are often overlooked as a method for cutting costs and saving time. A valuable and viable choice for businesses looking to improve efficiency and reduce overhead, barcodes are both cost-effective and reliable.

Crossroads RMC offers RMClabel which can be tied to any data collection system, or run stand-alone. Create barcode labels with 1D

Infor LN & Baan: Data Collection

Be honest. Does your business REALLY operate in real time?

Kathy Barthelt 0 40360 Article rating: 5.0

Do you have up-to-date real-time information on labor, machine time, and parts consumed? How accurate is your data? Can you get an accurate picture of what is going on across your operations at any time?

If not, Crossroads data collection solution should be considered. By combining sessions, eliminating duplicate entries and using available information to complete a transaction, Web Collect, formerly RMC3 extends the Infor LN and Baan applications to ensure efficiencies and timely information flow and reporting. 

Consulting News: Are you familiar with your Infor LN / Baan System Log?

Kathy Barthelt 0 38788 Article rating: 5.0

Data about the system and the application is stored in a system log. The system data includes information about:

  • The application environment
  • Any reorganization of tables
  • The available free disk space
  • The back-up schedule
  • The user data reports
  • The updates
  • Changes in the system
  • The error messages and solutions

Are you comfortable with reading your ERP system log? Have you checked it lately? Need help interpreting if your system may have a problem? Contact Kathy Barthelt today and one of our expert technical consultants can help to put your mind at ease and make sure your system is running as it should.

Infor LN & Baan Tip of the Week: Warehouse Blocking – LN 10.7

Kathy Barthelt 0 74037 Article rating: 5.0

The functionality to block a warehouse for inbound or outbound transactions has been enhanced. A check for blocks is performed not only during receipt and shipment confirmation, but at multiple stages in the process. In addition, you can specify these blocking options for the inbound and outbound processes:

• No

• Yes

• Interactive

For example, if Blocked for Inbound is set to Yes, no inbound actions are allowed in the warehouse. Consequently, users cannot confirm receipts, generate and put away inbound advice or storage lists, and perform inbound inspections. 

If Interactive is set, during a non-automatic warehouse inbound procedure, warnings are displayed which offer the user a choice to either cancel the action or continue. Batch or automatic inbound processes continue, but the corresponding reports and logs make note of the blocking. However, in all scenarios, receipt confirmation is not allowed.

The same rules are applicable for the warehouse outbound procedure steps. The restriction for receipt confirmation also applies to shipment confirmation.

For warehouse transfer orders, not only the ship-from warehouse is checked for outbound process blocks, but also the ship-to warehouse. This prevents situations in which goods get stuck in transit due to inbound procedure blocks that apply to the destination warehouse. Now, the transfer process is already blocked during outbound.

Partner News: Are you up to date on all of the sales tax changes that have gone into effect this year?

Crossroads RMC 0 34209 Article rating: 5.0

Like it or not, requirements for collecting sales tax change monthly and keeping up with those changes requires someone to be “on it” full time. Fortunately, Avalara handles all of that. Learn How >

Contact us to learn how we can take this burden off your plate and ensure that you are 100% in compliance, 100% of the time.

IDF News: Multi-Language Support

George Moroses 0 25651 Article rating: 5.0

IDF capabilities have been enhanced to provide support for many description elements to be displayed in the user’s language. MLS address and description information has been added to Vendor/Customer/Item business objects. Users can add/remove information as needed. Those display icons that do not have MLS fields on them may have MLS objects already created that can be used to add MLS field to those display icons.

Scope: The following multi language description fields are now available in IDF. To show them, select the multi-language field for the desired IDF panel.

• Item Description

• Warehouse Description

• Customer Name

• Vendor Name

• Vendor Accounting Type

• Company Name

• Currency Description

• Country Description

• General Ledger Account Description

• General Ledger Segment Value Description

 

Impact: These IDF programs are new or were updated to support multi language functionality:

• Account Segment Value MLS Extension

• Bank Branch MLS Override

• Bank MLS Override

• Company MLS Override

• Country Extension MLS Override

• Country MLS Override

• Currency Extension MLS Override

• Currency MLS Override

• Customer MLS Address Override

• Customer MLS Note

• Customer Order Class MLS Override

• Customer Terms MLS Override

• Enterprise Item MLS Note

• Enterprise Item MLS Override

• Freight Term MLS Extension

• Note MLS Line

• Sales Representative MLS Address Override

• Vendor MLS Address Override

• Vendor MLS Note

• Warehouse MLS Address

What problem is OTTO addressing?

George Moroses 0 29028 Article rating: 5.0

Most manufacturers are being pressured to reduce delivery lead-times and rely on their planning systems to meet their commitments. This works very well if everything happens as planned. But planning by itself doesn’t make things happen, people and processes make things happen. This acceleration is putting tremendous pressure on key users like planners, schedulers, buyers and production supervisors. Not only are they struggling to meet daily commitments and relying on “brute force” solutions to get the job done but they can actually become unrecognized production constraints. Planning is more important than ever but is no longer sufficient to meet current challenges because the real challenge in meeting commitments isn't planning but in making plans happen.

This is where OTTO comes in - Learn More>

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

Tips: LN | Baan

Anthony Etzel

How to Improve Customer Shipments With OTTO - A Case Study

Setting Industry Service Standards

Shenandoah Manufacturing, a $20 million producer of poultry-raising equipment (heaters and brooders), had been having difficulty for some time shipping orders to customers in a timely manner. They had successfully implemented a popular ERP system and had been using it for more than 3 years, yet the situation didn't improve. 

Customer Service Representatives were complaining about the frequent backorders and late orders. Employees were giving it their best effort, but were frustrated, and customers were threatening to take their business elsewhere.

The company considered installing an APS system as a possible solution, but found implementation would be difficult, expensive, and running the system might be a challenging task as a number of key business practices would have to be changed. A consultant familiar with OTTO suggested they look at that product as an alternative to APS. Several OTTO aspects cited by the consultant convinced them to consider a cursorily review. Specifically:

  • The non-intrusive nature of the product.
  • It's relative inexpensive initial investment.
  • The low overall total cost of ownership.
  • The integration with their ERP system.

The initial demonstration was impressive. OTTO was installed on Shenandoah's server within 45 minutes of arrival and, most impressively, it was fully functional with their real “live” data immediately. Needless to say, the demo was well received. Even more importantly Shenandoah was able to “test drive” the software to prove its applicability before making any dollar commitments.

According to Mark Shank, Information Systems Manager, some baseline measurements were made last year, and it was determined that approximately 50% of their customer orders had shipped on time. As they began using OTTO, on-time order performance rose to 90% for the month. And Shenandoah caught up on its entire backlog and started working ahead on February's orders. In February on-time shipment performance jumped to 92% and subsequently on-time performance has ranged somewhere between 98.3% and 99.5% — well above the 96% goal set by Management.

OTTO provides the means for keeping the whole production organization focused on the few things that have to happen as the ship date approaches to get each order shipped on time. Components that have the potential for delaying an order are identified so they can be managed. Shenandoah's staff, a precious and limited resource, now concentrates on analyzing information and managing the right things at the right time rather than digging out date. To quote one production control individual: “what use to take hours now takes seconds.”

According to Roy Hackett, Plant Manager: "Knowing the right things to pay attention to at the right time — information provided by OTTO — has allowed on-time shipping to be improved by 40 percentage points in less than one month and a lead time reduction from 3-4 weeks to 1-2 weeks on the most important products"

Guessing at what and how much of the work being processed is for real customer orders versus planned orders is eliminated which is especially important when capacity is short during the heavy portion of the business cycle. 

“By focusing on the right things at the right time, production expedites and interruptions are far fewer, production flow is much smoother and productivity is significantly improved.”

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Anthony Etzel

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