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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

3rd Hoffmaster Site Goes Lives with Crossroads MES

Anthony Etzel 0 24946 Article rating: No rating

Hoffmaster, a leading manufacturer of disposable tabletop paper products, has gone live with Crossroads MES at their Oshkosh, WI plant. This is the 3rd Hoffmaster plant that has gone live with the Crossroads MES solution, and implementation of 80 more machines is planned at this facility for later this year. Engineering drawings and other production-related documents are now immediately available at each workstation running MES, thereby increasing efficiency and accuracy in their operations.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Efficiency– The What & How

Anthony Etzel 0 45606 Article rating: No rating

Efficiency is something we all strive for in our personal lives and at work. How can manufacturers increase their efficiency? Take a hard look at the 4 key areas:

  1. Planning
  2. Bill of Material and Job Accuracy
  3. Inventory Planning
  4. Real Time Reporting / Processing 

Need help figuring out how to become more efficient in each of these areas? Contact us, we’d be happy to help.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Efficiency– The What & How

Kathy Barthelt 0 70323 Article rating: No rating

Efficiency is something we all strive for in our personal lives and at work. How can manufacturers increase their efficiency? Take a hard look at the 4 key areas:

  1. Planning
  2. Bill of Material and Job Accuracy
  3. Inventory Planning
  4. Real Time Reporting / Processing 

Need help figuring out how to become more efficient in each of these areas? Contact us, we’d be happy to help.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Learn More About Infor’s LX Exit Points Functionality

Anthony Etzel 0 47489 Article rating: No rating

Exit Points is a new feature in Infor LX Version 8 that allows users to customize, without changing the original LX source code. Exit points provide a way for you to call an external program and pass a set of parameters to implement any needed custom logic. By using Exit Points, LX customers are able to modify the software, and still take advantage of new releases from Infor. Exit points are available in many LX programs. A complete list is available on the Infor support website.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Top 10 Survival Tips For Manufacturers

by Guy Morgan / IndustryWeek

Kathy Barthelt 0 70859 Article rating: No rating

Under intense cost pressures, quality is at risk at many manufacturers. These 10 tips can help you survive the competitive challenges ahead.

  1. Maintain your focus. Make a decision about the kind of company you are and stick with it. 
  2. Reinvent your products regularly. Suppliers who sharply differentiate their products fare the best. 
  3. Maximize your productivity and increase your speed through enhanced product and process design. Lean manufacturing focuses on production and its associated costs from a component's conception.

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Real Time Access to Your Data

Anthony Etzel 0 38374 Article rating: No rating

Poor performance indicators make for poor outcomes.

Companies today continue to tolerate and accept how labor and production information is recorded, and the reliability on that information is questionable. In addition to collecting labor and production information, there are many other pieces of information manually recorded from the shop floor.

A critical element of information for productivity throughput would be to examine how much time the work center or machine was actually up and running. Downtime is another critical element of data that is usually manually recorded along with a reason identifying what caused production to stop. If this information is not provided on a timely and accurate basis, then what good is it anyway? Forms are filled out, data may or may not be keyed to a spreadsheet, the forms are sorted and filed, but is anybody really looking at the information that was recorded? Think about the amount of time it takes to manage the manual collection of information from your shop floor. 

What would real time access to data mean to your organization?
The benefits:

  1. Real Time Production Visibility
  2. Reduced Paperwork Load
  3. Downtime and Scrap Visibility
  4. WIP Inventory Visibility
  5. Improve Efficiency, Capacity Utilization

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Real Time Access to Your Data

Kathy Barthelt 0 73187 Article rating: No rating

Poor performance indicators make for poor outcomes.

Companies today continue to tolerate and accept how labor and production information is recorded, and the reliability on that information is questionable. In addition to collecting labor and production information, there are many other pieces of information manually recorded from the shop floor.

A critical element of information for productivity throughput would be to examine how much time the work center or machine was actually up and running. Downtime is another critical element of data that is usually manually recorded along with a reason identifying what caused production to stop. If this information is not provided on a timely and accurate basis, then what good is it anyway? Forms are filled out, data may or may not be keyed to a spreadsheet, the forms are sorted and filed, but is anybody really looking at the information that was recorded? Think about the amount of time it takes to manage the manual collection of information from your shop floor. 

What would real time access to data mean to your organization?
The benefits:

  1. Real Time Production Visibility
  2. Reduced Paperwork Load
  3. Downtime and Scrap Visibility
  4. WIP Inventory Visibility
  5. Improve Efficiency, Capacity Utilization

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: January - Time to Reflect and Plan

Anthony Etzel 0 44651 Article rating: No rating

Happy New Year! January is always a great time to reflect on the prior year – what went well, and what didn’t. It is also the obvious time to plan for the coming year – what do I want to accomplish and how can I best achieve my goals?

As the saying goes, “you can’t improve what you can’t measure”, so if you haven’t already, it is time to start putting processes, procedures and programs in place within your company to measure how well each department is doing against their objectives. Start to analyze your numbers and publish them internally. Where are you at currently? Where do you want to be? Seeing both sets of numbers pushes employees to hit those targets. Do this now, and you’ll be seeing positive results before you know it!  

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

Improves control over PO costing changes during invoice entry by replacing passive warnings with an intentional override action.

  • In ACP500D3 (Invoice Entry PO Costing), users previously could unintentionally accept changes by pressing ENTER, even when quantity to cost or amount to cost values had changed.

  • A new “F14 to Override” warning message replaces the old message:
    “Details have changed. Press enter again to accept data.”
    This ensures users acknowledge and confirm significant changes explicitly.

New System Parameter:

  • “Apply GRN Costing Tolerance for PO Costing” (optional):

    • Within tolerance: Displays the original message —
      “Details have changed. Press enter again to accept data.”

    • Outside tolerance: Triggers the new override requirement —
      “F14 to Override”

Benefits:

  • Enhances oversight and reduces unintentional cost acceptance.

  • Enables better control of PO costs when invoice details differ from expectations.

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Tips: LN | Baan

ERP & the Importance of Accuracy & Productivity

Infor LN & Baan

If you don't think accuracy and productivity are important, you need to take a hard look at HOW you’re running your ERP system.

  • Have you eliminated large amounts of data entry?
  • Is your data error-free at month's end?
  • Do all of your systems talk to one another?

If the answer is no, Crossroads RMC can improve accuracy and productivity with system integration and/or automation.

Too expensive you say? Too time-consuming and way too much effort to make it happen? 
Not necessarily... Crossroads RMC consultants deliver valuable integrations and automated processes at a fraction of the cost of other providers.

Whether you’re running ION on the latest version of Infor LN or using Baan IV or Baan V with no integration platform in place, there are benefits to automation and system integration for every area of your business:

Finance:
Say goodbye to typos that lead to huge problems, like paying invoices late or charging the wrong customer. You’ll have accurate data in your system, so month-end processes run smoother and your employees are freed up to do more important tasks.

Customer Relationship Management:
When it comes to keeping customers happy, speed is crucial. You can automate invoicing, customer reports, and more to ensure that customers always have what they need. Automate report delivery from your system to ensure you always have the right information at your fingertips. And even without automating report delivery, your ERP system brings all the information together in one place, and automated data entry and extraction means it’s accurate.

Supply Chain Management:
Set up automated alerts to the right people. With ERP automation, you can trigger an email when a product has low stock or is overstocked. Keeping inventory levels just right is essential to be able to fulfill orders but not waste resources by having too much on hand.

Manufacturing Resource Planning:
Say goodbye to appending data manually. Let’s say you get a shipment of inventory that is a different color than you’d planned, which means they need different SKUs. Now you have thousands of SKUs to update, but an automated process can append data in the system unattended in a fraction of the time it’d take a person to do it.

Human Resource Management:
It might not be that hard to pull the sales data to calculate commissions manually for one sales rep. But multiply that by a growing sales force every pay period, and you’ll be grateful you automated your ERP system. Integrate with HR platforms to manage data transfers for calculating sales and commissions, even setting up triggers to do this automatically at the same time every week.

These are just a few of the possible ways to simplify your ERP system and produce accurate results that save time and money. 


Crossroads RMC has assisted many clients with integrations and automation for Infor LN and Baan. 800.762.2077 |  solutions@crossroadsrmc.com

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Kathy Barthelt

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