Please Wait a Moment
X

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

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

Anthony Etzel 0 47908 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 71286 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 38915 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 74409 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 45406 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!

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: January - Time to Reflect and Plan

Kathy Barthelt 0 73853 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!

First9394959698100101102Last

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.

Print
19244 Rate this article:
5.0
Kathy Barthelt

Kathy BartheltKathy Barthelt

Other posts by Kathy Barthelt

Contact author

x

Categories