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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

Webinar: Business Insights Made Easy With Dashboards - Infor LX/BPCS

Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 12:00-1:00 (US/Central)

George Moroses 0 351 Article rating: 5.0


  

Join Crossroads RMC
& the InforIBMi-Series Community

Business Insights Made Easy With Dashboards

Learn how easy it is to create and use dashboards to gain valuable insights into the data you use daily to run your business.

Join our webinar: Thursday, May 2, 2024 at 12:00pm Noon (US/Central) for 1 hour.

Register →


Presenter: Anthony Etzel

Infor LN & Baan: Customizing Shipping Labels for All Customers

Kathy Barthelt 0 2222 Article rating: 5.0

Are you striving to create shipping labels that cater to all your customers' needs? Do you require specific details on your shipping labels for particular items or product lines?

According to recent research, the global barcode label printer market was valued at $2.6 billion in 2022 and is estimated to reach $4.3 billion by 2032, exhibiting a CAGR of 5.2% from 2023 to 2032.

Crossroads RMC's RMClabel software automates the printing of customer-specific and item-specific labels...

​Infor LN & Baan Tip: Determining What Data to Archive or Delete

Kathy Barthelt 0 2567 Article rating: 5.0

Ensuring access to historical logistical and financial transaction information for your employees is crucial. However, before proceeding with archiving or deletion, it's essential to evaluate the necessity of retaining this data. Baan and Infor LN (ERP LN) offer standard archiving sessions within major modules that typically handle a significant volume of historical transactions. These sessions are designed to transfer historical data to an archive company before deleting it from the operational company.

When it comes to archiving sessions, you have three primary options:

Infor LX & BPCS Tip: MPS Planned vs. MRP Planned

George Moroses 0 2200 Article rating: 5.0

Determining whether to use Master Production Schedule (MPS) planning or Material Requirements Planning (MRP) planning for items in Infor LX and BPCS involves understanding the nature of the items and their demand characteristics.

Master Scheduled Items typically encompass finished goods or service items. These items receive their requirements either from Independent demand, Dependent demand, or a combination of both...

Unlocking the Full Potential of Your LX/BPCS Investment - Embrace the Cloud for Enhanced Connectivity

George Moroses 0 1415 Article rating: 5.0

At Crossroads RMC, we understand that our clients are fiercely loyal to Infor LX/BPCS because of its breadth of capabilities, reliability, and efficiency. Simply put, it stands as an indispensable tool for your business operations.

Thanks to our new partnership with Aleran Software, we’ve made it easy and affordable to extend your LX/BPCS investment with a suite of modern, cloud-based sales tools, including:

  • Aleran Software Mini DemoCustomer/Dealer Portal Capabilities: Empower your customers and dealers with intuitive portal access.
  • Streamlined CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote): Simplify complex configurations and pricing processes.
  • Efficient Sales Order Management: Centralize all cart activities, quoting, and sales orders for seamless operations.
  • Sales-Focused PIM (Product Information Management): Store vital sales-driving information for enhanced decision-making.
  • Flexible Buying Sites: Offer unlimited buying sites tailored to customer or dealer preferences, complete with customizable price points.
  • Integrated Catalog and Tech Manual Buying: Facilitate integrated buying directly from existing catalogs and technical manuals.
     

With a modern, cloud-based deployment, Crossroads RMC can help you remove the risk and eliminate the headaches that come from traditional cost-prohibitive builds and months-long integrations. We can help you put your customers at the center of a multi-channel sales strategy with curated sales experiences, personalized promotions, and out-of-the-box fully configurable tools and features.  

Contact us today at 800.762.2077 to jumpstart your path to enhanced connectivity and sales efficiency.

We're excited to unveil our revamped BPCS/LX Technical Staff Augmentation Services

George Moroses 0 2064 Article rating: 5.0

We're excited to share some updates about our BPCS/LX Technical Staff Augmentation Services. At Crossroads, we're refining our staff augmentation structures to better cater to specific job descriptions. This enhanced offering is designed to provide our clients with the opportunity to seamlessly maintain product-level support (BPCS/LX – RPG) and development assistance. What sets this program apart is its ability to offer significant cost savings compared to traditional time and material arrangements. We aim to make staff augmentation more accessible and customizable to meet varying budgetary needs.

As part of this agreement, Crossroads will allocate a dedicated BPCS/LX technical resource for a set number of hours per week. The exact hours will be mutually agreed upon during the sourcing requirements discussions, ensuring that the support arrangement aligns perfectly with your needs.

Key Features of the Technical Staff Augmentation Service:

  • Flexible Hours: Tailored to your specific needs, we'll collaborate with you to determine a fixed number of hours per week that best aligns with your requirements.

  • Duration Options: Choose from flexible prepaid agreement durations of 3, 6, 9, or 12 months.

  • Remote Accessibility: Our technical services are primarily remote, but onsite assistance can also be discussed and arranged during the project kickoff phase, ensuring comprehensive support regardless of location.

  • Expertise Spectrum: Our dedicated BPCS/LX technical resources boast a comprehensive skill set, including proficiency in RPG, thorough documentation practices, design capabilities, familiarity with IBMi system foundations, job scheduling expertise, SQL proficiency, CL development capabilities, and more.

  • Scope Clarification: While our agreement primarily focuses on technical support and development assistance, application support falls outside the defined scope and can be considered separately upon request.

This innovative approach to technical staff augmentation is designed to streamline your operations, enhance system reliability, and empower your team to maximize the full potential of your BPCS/LX environment. Let's embark on this journey together, customizing technical staff augmentation solutions that precisely align with your business objectives and budgetary constraints.

Request a phone consultation or Learn

Introducing VJES (Visual Job Execution Software)

Kathy Barthelt 0 2205 Article rating: 5.0

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)...

Infor LN & Baan Tip: Performance improvement by setting the First Free Number Cache (tcmcs0651m000)

Kathy Barthelt 0 3290 Article rating: 5.0

Many transactions in all kinds of modules use order numbers or serial numbers. These order numbers are most often automatically generated. In the Number Groups (tcmcs0151m000) session you can define groups of order numbers used for dedicated areas. A Number Group is a group of the first free number series that you can assign to a specific use. All the numbers that Infor LN generates in the number groups that are dedicated to the same purpose are unique.

All the first free numbers are stored in the table tcmcs050.

As many different processes can request a free number from the number groups, we often see delays in the performance, due to locking on the first free number records. This locking issue can have a severe impact on the performance of huge batch-type transactions, but also on the performance perceived by individual users in many areas in LN.

For example:

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

Determining whether to use Master Production Schedule (MPS) planning or Material Requirements Planning (MRP) planning for items in Infor LX and BPCS involves understanding the nature of the items and their demand characteristics.

Master Scheduled Items typically encompass finished goods or service items. These items receive their requirements either from Independent demand, Dependent demand, or a combination of both...

Advanced Remittance Processing, ARP, provides an automated approach to your cash application process. ARP works together with Accounts Receivable to save valuable time and resources by automatically applying incoming payments to open receivables during daily batch processing. You can easily and efficiently resolve unapplied remittances online.

Advanced Remittance Processing (ARP) is an automatic cash application process that allows you to perform the following functions:

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Tips: LN | Baan

An ERP System Review is NOT a Report Card

It's a no-judgment-review - we promise!

report card C minusWe all remember our school days and the nervousness that we felt when it came time to get our grades. Even if we were doing well, we were still nervous. Sometimes we experienced that same nervousness when it came time for a performance review on our job. Nervousness…sometimes dread…knowing that our performance was not what we wanted it to be, or others expected it to be. 

Somehow I think the feelings that we felt in our past often find ways to creep into our present. I have seen this recently when I suggested an ERP system review to one of our customers. They immediately became flustered and thought about every possible problem that they knew existed within the software and how they were currently using it. I asked them to consider the purpose of the ERP system review.

An ERP Utilization Review will:

  • Document how your company is using your ERP system (or a particular aspect of the system) and to what extent the system meets the needs of the business.
  • Identify challenges encountered using the software.
  • Create opportunities for improving business processes and generating additional value.
  • Identify potential risks and areas that need improvement.


key hole to the futureSo, if the result of ERP system review is to establish a path forward for growth based on current status, then why doesn’t every company take advantage of it? I think for some, the answer lies in the feelings of nervousness and dread still stuck in the recesses of our brains.

An ERP system review or more specifically a utilization review is NOT a personal report card, or performance review showing how well a particular individual does his/hers/their job, nor is it an attack on the team that implemented the software. 

As they say, hindsight is 20/20. What we view now to be a less than ideal implementation methodology may have been absolutely appropriate at the time the software was originally deployed. The software has likely matured and the skillsets of the individuals responsible for the system have likely matured as well. In some cases, those resources are no longer with the company, leaving those that remain with no back story as to how and why implementation decisions were made.

Instead of viewing the ERP utilization review as a reason to find fault in previous decisions, think of it as discovering untapped potential – both of the ERP system and the people who use it. Viewing an ERP utilization review in this way puts a positive spin on it and allows us to challenge ourselves to identify opportunities for growth far greater than anything we imagined before. This means not only moving our businesses forward faster but also advancing the strength of the company as individuals and as a team.

What untapped potential lies within your company?

Consider a utilization review of your entire ERP system, or just a part of it like Finance, Technology, Materials Management, Order Processing, or Shop Floor Control. You just might be surprised at what greatness can be achieved… far greater than anyone could have imagined.  

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800.762.2077

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Kathy Barthelt

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