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Infor LX Tips, Infor LN Tips, BPCS Tips, Baan Tips, Infor M3 Tips & Infor ERP News

Crossroads Connections

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 24936 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 45583 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 70307 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 47470 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 70834 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 38341 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 72239 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 44466 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.

Last

Tips: LN | Baan

Kathy Barthelt
/ Categories: Infor LN & Baan Tips

Infor LN & Baan Tips & Tricks for EXECUTIVES

FINANCE TIP:

Cash Forecast Reports and Inquiries

To produce the cash flow forecast, the combined information from the following is used:

  • Customer and supplier accounts
  • Open sales and purchase orders
  • Purchase quotations
  • Purchase requisitions
  • Standing orders
  • Projects
  • Financial budgets

You can use the bank balances of the bank relations that are maintained in the Bank Relations (tfcmg0510m000) session, to generate the reports with details of cash inflows and outflows of the company for a specified period of time.

You can also manually specify the Opening Balance for the cash forecast. Use the sessions below to print and generate the reports:

  • Cash Forecast Summary by Date Range/Currency (tfcmg3518s000)
  • Print Cash Forecast Details by Date Range/Currency (tfcmg3412m000)
  • Print Cash Forecast Summary by Period/Currency (tfcmg3410m000)
  • Cash Forecast Summary by Date/Currency (tfcmg3519s000)
  • Print Detailed Cash Forecast in Cash Forecast Currency (tfcmg3413m000)
  • Cash Forecast Components by Date/Currency (tfcmg3520m000)
  • Print Forecast Components by Date/Currency (tfcmg3420m000)

OPERATIONS TIP:

Deleting Purchase Orders:

  • If Finances is implemented, we recommend that you do not delete order data in a fiscal year that has not yet been fully closed. This is because the GRINYA process uses information that would be deleted by this action. For best results, check whether the logistical balance for non-invoiced receipts matches the balance of the GRINYA accounts for the periods up to which you want to delete purchase order data.
  • When a purchase order is canceled, you can only delete the purchase order and the related tables. If only a purchase order line is canceled, the line can be deleted and archived.

You cannot delete a purchase order (line) if:

  • The linked warehouse order is closed but cannot be removed.
  • The purchase order is linked to a PCS project that is not yet archived. When the PCS project is archived, the purchase data is also archived and you can delete the purchase order.
  • A consignment replenishment order is not yet consumed completely.
  • The invoice is yet to be completely matched and approved.
  • The invoice amount is not yet inserted as turnover history.
  • The sales order or service order that is linked to the purchase order line, and for which an internal invoice must be sent from the purchase office to the sales office or service office, is not yet invoiced. In this case, you cannot delete the purchase order line before the sales order or service order is invoiced.

TECHNOLOGY TIP:

Application Personalization

Users can personalize sessions and apply special formatting to the data displayed in sessions. The personalizations and formatting settings that are specified by the users are stored on the LN server. Administrators can maintain these settings.

  • Session personalizations

    Users can personalize sessions in various ways. users can, for example, hide fields, change labels, customize the toolbar, and move fields to another tab. Administrators can maintain the personalizations defined by the users. For example, an administrator can export personalizations to an XML file, import personalizations from an XML file, and copy personalizations to another user, to a DEM role, or to a company number.

  • Report personalizations

    You can use the Report Designer (ttstppersrep) to personalize the layouts and style of reports, without modifying the standard reports or using an external reporting solution. The changes are stored as personalizations.

    You can also generate new reports that are based on a selection of fields from the application data model. These reports are generated in the extensibility package. You can personalize these reports in the Report Designer (ttstppersrep), or modify them in Infor LN Studio.

    For details, see the Infor LN Report Designer Development Guide
     
  • Conditional formatting

    users can define conditions to apply special formatting to the data displayed in LN sessions. The users can define multiple conditions per session and different types of formatting, such as a specific color for particular fields or rows, and a warning symbol for particular rows. Administrators can maintain the formatting settings specified by the users and can define system-wide formatting settings.

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Kathy Barthelt

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