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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 68337 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 91847 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 52068 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 25015 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 45792 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 70526 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
/ Categories: Infor LN & Baan Tips

Tip of the Week: Ways to Manage the Pain of Losing a Key Employee Before it Ever Happens

  • Sit down with your IT team. Decide how the information will be captured and where it will be stored so that employees have access to it. What software tools need to be used to capture the information? How does it need to be organized? Create a repeatable process to make this easy for your staff.
     
  • Interview the person. Have them talk you through his/her job. What are the things they do every day? What are their biggest challenges? How do they overcome them? 
     
  • Have someone shadow the person for a week. Watch what they do and how they do it. Ask questions. Who does he/she interact with in their department? Outside of their department? Why?
     
  • Find out what tools he/she uses to perform their job? Are there spreadsheets?  Reports within your ERP / outside of your ERP? Separate stand-alone databases? Drawings? Websites? Why does he/she use them?
     
  • Video record how the person does their job. Is their technique critical to “doing it right” the first time and not ending up with a bunch of scrap that you can’t reuse?
     
  • Figure out if the person does anything special on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis that might not come up during the observation period or interview. 
     
  • Map how he/she uses your business system and how that impacts the rest of the company. Understand both the “what” and the “why”. Without this, new employees may end up figuring out what they need to do, but never understand why they need to do it.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

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Kathy Barthelt

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