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Infor LX | Infor LN | BPCS | Baan | Infor M3

Kathy Barthelt
/ Categories: Infor LN & Baan Tips

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Top 10 Survival Tips For Manufacturers

by Guy Morgan / IndustryWeek

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.
  4. Pay attention to your supply chain. You must know about any risks, financial or otherwise, that threaten your suppliers. 
  5. Offshoring vs Onshoring. You must know the total cost of products. 
  6. Improve quality. There are still too many manufacturers delivering components with high defect rates. 
  7. Diversify your customer base. This may involve segmenting your industry or going outside it.
  8. Embrace globalization. Acquisitions, consolidations and diversification can help suppliers achieve economies of scale. 
  9. Invest in your employees. Suppliers who paid higher wages and made bigger investments in training and equipment came through the downturn better than those who didn't.
  10. Facilitate total productive maintenance. While this concept has been around for decades, some manufacturers are still not training machine operators to perform many of the day-to-day tasks of simple maintenance and fault-finding.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

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Kathy Barthelt

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

When to use a user-defined inventory transaction

ERP LX (BPCS) provides you with the flexibility to create inventory transactions without program modifications. The typical transaction types are defined with effects set on how the transaction will impact inventory balances.

Perhaps you want to process a customer return and don’t want the inventory to be impacted. You can create a user define transaction effect to allow the customer receipt and not update the inventory balance.

Is Lot Control necessary?

Certain industries require lot control, where others may find it an option based on how they want to trace the material used in a product in the event of a defect, or recall.

LX provides tight lot controls and flexibility with lot number assignments. Shop orders can have a pre-assigned lot number, or a lot number can be automatically assigned when the item is produced. You can also assign a specific lot number for the entire shop order, or for each item/quantity reported against a shop order.

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Tips: LN | Baan

Instead of sharing tables through logical linking, you can replicate table content between companies. This approach allows certain non-key attributes of a record to vary by company. For example, if you replicate bills of materials rather than sharing them, each company can associate a different warehouse with the same bill of material. This way, the bills of materials are consistent across companies, while the warehouses can differ.

Replication also enables selective availability of records in other companies. For instance, when replicating items, you might limit which items are available in a sales company based on their item group, only including end items. You can further refine replication to specific subsets, such as particular item groups.

Keep in mind that replication requires any referenced tables to be either replicated or shared as well.

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