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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

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Why Would You Buy a BMW, But Use a Scooter?

Kathy Barthelt 0 68554 Article rating: 5.0

Congratulations! You bought that shiny, new car! It has all the features you can possibly want and goes a million miles an hour. It can take you anywhere your heart desires…….but you rely on a manual scooter to get you around. You know, the kind you had when you were a kid…BEFORE you could drive…before you could afford the BMW. Make sense? Uh... no.

You’d never do this, right? So, why are you doing this with the ERP system that runs your business? Why are you relying on spreadsheets and separate little Access databases to record and store the information that is the most critical to your business when you have an ERP system that is meant for this? Why continue to plod along at a snail's pace when you have the tools to take your business to the next level?

Your ERP system is your BMW. Use it. See what it can do for you. Think you’ve used it to its potential? Unlikely. We’ve helped customers breathe new life into their EXISTING ERP version all by unlocking functionality for them that was already there and ready to use! We’ve also helped by offering add-ons to the ERP that can make your productivity skyrocket.

Ask us how. We’ve got an extra set of keys to the BMW in case you lost yours.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Tip of the Week: The 3 Secrets to Improving Your MO (Manufacturing Optimization)

Kathy Barthelt 0 92272 Article rating: No rating
  1. Identify the key metrics. You need benchmark data so you know what realistic goals are, then track them and publish your performance along with a brief comment from time to time on how things are trending and how you compare with others, particularly your primary competitors. The best thing about this is that it is a system that develops a life of its own.
     
  2. Measure it. Automatically, people start to think about improving things. Then the fun part, stuff begins to improve by itself. Once in place, the system just hums along and the benefits appear, because it has motivated people to think about it, and figure out what they can do to make it better.
     
  3. Communicate it. Publish your numbers, and explain to people how what they do affects the company as a whole and its success/failure. Once they see the numbers, employees quite often start to modify their behavior for the better.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: CEA

Anthony Etzel 0 52275 Article rating: No rating

CEA Upload provides the capability to prepare both Budgets and Journal Entries in Excel. Once the spreadsheet is complete, it can be uploaded to CEA for posting as an entry to the GL Book of choice. Ease of use is achieved and a full audit trail is created. LX users can capitalize on their investment in both CEA and Excel to achieve a better accounting process. 

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

3rd Hoffmaster Site Goes Lives with Crossroads MES

Anthony Etzel 0 25116 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 45950 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 70831 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!

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

Tips: LN | Baan

Kathy Barthelt

Introducing VJES (Visual Job Execution Software)

You would be hard-pressed to completely miss the stories in the news recently about quality issues in manufacturing. The crux of the issue has been a complete focus on production and a lack of focus on quality. Yes, it is a wonderful thing to get the goods out the door, but when you’re sacrificing quality, what good is it really?

There are specifications for production for a reason. Engineering exists for a reason. If products are not built according to exact design specifications, scrap is likely to go up, rework goes up, customer returns and/or service requests go up, and customer satisfaction and overall customer confidence in your product plummets.

Is all of that worth it to get the good out the door in the shortest amount of time possible?

Every manufacturer relies on a few core measurements to manage their operations. Measurements like efficiency, productivity, capacity, labor and equipment utilization are used by manufacturers across the globe to benchmark performance and assess the effectiveness of processes.

Quality needs to be part of that mix. Because measurements like efficiency and productivity don’t necessarily mean high quality, incorporating ways to ensure quality from the start can help to eliminate waste and rework.

Manufacturing quality is achieved through quality control using documented, repeatable, and measurable processes.

What if you could incorporate quality control in every operation, at every work center to not only ensure high-quality finished goods but also simultaneously train high-quality operators?

Introducing Crossroads’ ERP independent solution, VJES (Visual Job Execution Software). VJES is an electronic work instruction interface between engineering and the paperless manufacturing floor. VJES makes available only one version of the work instructions – the RIGHT one. By deploying up-to-date, visually rich work instructions, images, and videos, VJES gives production personnel the best opportunity to build it right the first time and provides a way to track worker productivity during the build at every step.

VJES Overview

VJES achieves RESULTS:

  • Turn new hire welders into specialized welders in 2 weeks
  • Improvement of quality score from 68/100 to 93/100 in 12 months
  • During the first month of use, employee training timeframe improved from 1 week, to 3 days.
  • First pass yield percentage at 100% for 8 months straight this year.
  • Able to incorporate a quality cell after productivity increased due to newfound bandwidth received when adopting VJES.


Request a demo or Contact us to learn more.

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Kathy Barthelt

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