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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

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Have you defined your KPIs?

Anthony Etzel 0 45545 Article rating: No rating

Key Performance Indicators measure how effectively your performance objectives are being achieved.

  • Have you defined KPIs for your company?
  • Are you measuring them effectively?
  • Is everyone in your company aware of what the KPIs are?

If you haven’t already done so, consider tying personal performance objectives directly to the company’s performance objectives. Doing so can greatly increase the likelihood that the company’s goals will be met.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Have you defined your KPIs?

Kathy Barthelt 0 82524 Article rating: No rating

Key Performance Indicators measure how effectively your performance objectives are being achieved.

  • Have you defined KPIs for your company?
  • Are you measuring them effectively?
  • Is everyone in your company aware of what the KPIs are?

If you haven’t already done so, consider tying personal performance objectives directly to the company’s performance objectives. Doing so can greatly increase the likelihood that the company’s goals will be met.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Need a Productivity Boost?

Anthony Etzel 0 50446 Article rating: No rating

Are your employees not as productive as you’d like them to be? Are jobs not getting completed on schedule? Without actual data, making decisions about how efficient your operation is will be difficult. Start tracking actual time to complete each operation. Compare different production lines running the same job. Is one line running more efficiently? If so, start looking at why. Track downtime, setup, etc. Once you start really analyzing each piece of the puzzle, you can begin to uncover areas that are ripe for improvement.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: How Are You Generating Financial Statements?

Kathy Barthelt 0 84121 Article rating: No rating

If you’re not already, consider generating your financial statements directly out of Baan/LN. In the Financial Statements module, you can define and print financial and consolidated statements. These statements can be based on various cross sections of your General Ledger account and dimension structure. You can also define cash flow statements, which can be based on cash flow reasons.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Create a Culture of Engaged Problem Solvers

Anthony Etzel 0 47386 Article rating: No rating

When there is a problem, making a decision in a vacuum is the worst thing you can do.

Get input from others within your organization. If possible, consult those at various levels. By being open with others as to the nature of the problem, and enlisting their help in determining the right solution, resistance to the recommended solution is quite often greatly reduced.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Create a Culture of Engaged Problem Solvers

Kathy Barthelt 0 79385 Article rating: No rating

When there is a problem, making a decision in a vacuum is the worst thing you can do.

Get input from others within your organization. If possible, consult those at various levels. By being open with others as to the nature of the problem, and enlisting their help in determining the right solution, resistance to the recommended solution is quite often greatly reduced.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

CROSSROADS MES VERSION 11.2 RELEASED

Anthony Etzel 0 32098 Article rating: 5.0

Crossroads RMC is proud to announce the official release of Crossroads MES Version 11.2

Included in this release are many new features including: Priority Code Display, Capacity Load Balancing, Indirect Time Reporting, T.L Ashford Label Integration, In-Line Label Validation, and a new XML Dashboard Interface. 
Improvements have been made to the ERP Interface, Manual Labor Time Capture, Parts List Display, Setup Operation, and End of Shift Review.

Crossroads MES for BPCS/LX has been around since 1995. Your input is important to us. Many of our improvements and functions come from your requests, so please share your ideas.

Future Functionality Coming Soon!

  • Employee/Shop Order Efficiency
  • IDF Reporting
  • Field Size Expansion
  • Non-windows tablet version

Click here for more details

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: 4 Reasons You Need Timely & Accurate Data

Anthony Etzel 0 52789 Article rating: No rating

Seems obvious – you want real time data and you want it to be accurate. Do you have the systems in place to allow for this?

Here are 4 reasons you need a data collection system:

  1. See the differences between actuals and standards
  2. Determine the source of project overruns
  3. Prevent mis-shipments to customers
  4. Avoid unnecessary reordering of parts

An automated data collection system will analyze your current data, allowing you to efficiently optimize your manufacturing and the benefits will be huge and far reaching.

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

Infor LN & Baan Manufacturing Tip: Performance Problems in Generate Order Planning (cprrp1210m000)

When the Generate Order Planning (cprrp1210m000) session is run it can take minutes to days to finish the process.

The performance of this session depends on many settings, like the number of plan items, the number of orders, but it also depends on hardware and database setup.

Here are some guidelines on how performance can be improved.

  • Be sure you are always on the latest solutions with the planning sessions. We are constantly improving the software to gain more speed in the Enterprise Planning (EP) sessions.
  • The number of planned items is critical. Try to reduce the number of planned items. Is it necessary that all items be planned via EP? For shop floor stock the TPOP or SIC replenish systems are often more suitable.
  • When you use PCS, be sure to close the projects when they are finished. When a PCS project has status Closed, the customized items will not be planned.

It's better to run Remove Plan Items for closed Projects (cprpd1220m000). This session removes the item planning data for customized items of closed projects.

  • If you run EP with the option, Also Generate Item Master Plan and/or Online Update Item Master Plan, consider if you need an Item Master Plan for all plan items. An Item Master Plan is usually meant for global long-term planning. Again this is not very useful for shop floor stock. Reducing the number of master-planned items improves performance.
  • When you use Resource Master Plans; are all your resources really critical? If a work center is not critical do not create a Resource Master Plan for it.
  • When using Item Master Plans and/or Resource Master Plans, set in Scenarios (cprpd4100m000) the total scenario length as short as possible. For example, if your sales order horizon is 2 years, a scenario end date which is 3 years after the current date is sufficient. During the calculations of the Item Master Plan and the Resource Master, all periods defined in the scenario are checked and calculated. So if you have the end date of the scenario on 2038, EP will do the calculations (for every master-planned item) until 2038.

Defining a rolling scenario will keep your scenario length constant and you don’t have to worry that you run beyond your scenario's end date.

  • Updating the pegging relations has a serious impact on the EP performance. In EP Parameters (cprpd0100m000) you can set the Pegging Horizon in days. Keep this horizon as short as possible. The Update Signals by Item/Planner option also has some impact, but less than the pegging.
  • EP uses the so-called phase numbers to detect the lowest level in which an item is used within a BOM structure or in a supplying relation. If the phase numbers are not ‘up-to-date’, EP will correct the phase numbers during the planning. This takes time during the planning run. If there are loops in BOMs or in supplying relations, this recalculation has a big impact on the performance. Therefore you could run Compute Phase Numbers (cprpd6200m000) on a regular basis. For example once a month. Always run this session with the Generate Report option selected. If loops are detected these are reported. Be sure to solve all the reported errors.
  • When unexpected results occur, especially when the data is imported from external packages, always check the number of records in tables cprpd100 and cprpd120. The number of records should match! Remark: From 10.4 onwards the table cprpd120 has become obsolete so this point not applicable anymore.
  • The number of calendars also impacts planning performance. Then for every warehouse, work center, or BP, and so on, a different calendar is defined. Planning has to read all of these calendars from start to end. This can have a huge impact on performance.
    • If you link a calendar to a work center or warehouse, avoid defining a new calendar for every work center/warehouse. Try to link the same calendar to more than one department.
    • Define the start of the calendar close to the start date of the scenario. For example, the current date is 01-07-2014, the start date of the scenario is 365 days in the past. So a start date for your calendar could be 01-07-2012.
    • Define the end date of the calendar not too far in the future. Depending on the end date of the scenario you could use 5 years ahead.  For example, the current date is 01-07-2014, the end date of the scenario is 3 years in the future. So an end date for your calendar could be 01-07-2022. Do not define an end date past 19-01-2038, which is the last UTC date Infor LN can handle.

Also, the interaction with the database can have a big impact on performance. 
A commonly used way to improve the total run time of the EP run is to start the session in parallel processing. 
See also Knowledge Base Article 22881401 Performance, Tracing and tuning Guide, for more details.

These guidelines are just some hints, and a good starting point because performance is a complex issue.

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