Infor Nexus VP of product marketing and strategy Heidi Benko this month became the recipient of 2024 Pros to Know Award by Supply & Demand Chain Executive. This award recognizes outstanding executives whose accomplishments offer a roadmap for other leaders looking to leverage supply chain for competitive advantage. Marina Mayer, editor-in-chief of Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive, comments, “Many of today’s supply chain pros are more than just leaders within their space; they’re innovators, decision makers, pioneers of change and growth. They’ve spent the last year (and more) creating safer, more efficient supply chains. New this year, we broke the award down into four distinct categories: Top Warehousing Stars; Top Procurement Stars; Rising Stars; and Lifetime Achievement. These winners continue to go above and beyond to overcome challenges, advance supply chain management and make the impossible, possible.” Per the news release, Benko has been an integral part of the Infor Nexus team to champion sustainability and social responsibility top priorities across the supply chain. She works closely with customers, prospects, industry leaders and analysts to drive greater awareness of how the unique, single-instance global supply chain platform can help companies run more efficient, profitable and sustainable supply chains.

 

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When you’re logged into Lawson, in order to compile all the programs invoked by one program, make sure that the syntax reads: lstinvk -q <pdl> <program>.

 

By doing this it will compile anything that is invoked by the program. After, you do this, then you will need to also compile the program itself. (See screenshot below for reference)

 

That’s all there is to it!

Steve Banker, Vice President of Supply Chain Services at ARC Advisory Group, shares a post on Forbes summarizing Infor’s strategy for differentiating their solutions at the Innovation Summit held on March 18-19th.  According to Banker, several top executives laid out Infor’s strategy for differentiating their solutions based on their approach to technology, product development, and customer service. Infor, with anticipated revenues of $3.4 billion for 2024, is the third largest supplier of enterprise resource planning software applications. Below is a summary of topics covered and  the tech giant’s approach to each one.

Infor’s Approach to Industry Specific Solutions. “The ERP market is making the transition to the Cloud. ERP firms like Infor, Oracle, and SAP – or supply chain software companies – like Manhattan Associates and Blue Yonder – have produced multitenant cloud solutions. Some of these companies are further along in their journey to convince their customers to move to a multi-tenant solution than others. Multi-tenancy, also known as ‘public cloud,’ is a software architecture where multiple instances of an application run on the same physical server. A public cloud solution has two key advantages. It can be much quicker to implement, so customers have a quicker payback period. Customers can also continue to get new functionality without going through a painful upgrade process. With traditional software, the upgrade process was so painful that many companies rarely, if ever, upgraded. But for customers to fully achieve these benefits, they need to commit to forgoing customization. Increasingly, large enterprises have decided to do just that. But where Infor is different from the largest ERP suppliers in the market is that instead of building one public cloud solution that serves all their customers, they have built three separate public cloud solutions. Each public cloud solution is designed to support a limited number of industries.”

 

Infor Success Teams. “Infor has developed customer success teams. A customer has a dedicated team that is headed up by a person with deep knowledge of the customer’s industry. The team is evaluated, in part, based on their ability to generate value for that customer over time. These teams’ job is to ask, “did the customer achieve the return on investment they were aiming for with their implementation?” Before an implementation begins, the potential is mapped. Industry best practice processes will be examined. If the customer commits to this out of the box process, what is the value they will gain? The value derived from the implementation will depend upon the customer achieving certain key performance indicators or key value indicators across all the ‘best practice’ processes. The software architecture allows the value to be measured and those metrics are visible to both the customer and the success team.”

 

Laying the Groundwork for Customer Success. “The customer success program, while more complete, does not sound radically different then what other software vendors have described as how they work with key customers. What is different is that the groundwork for achieving success is laid out during the sales process. “The implementation really starts in the sales cycle,” Frank Resink, the executive vice president of professional services, said. For food & beverage, Infor has up to 900 processes. They go through these processes with potential customers and define the value drivers. Infor works with the customer to validate which out of the box process will drive value and identify which out of the box processes would need to be adapted.”

 

Is the New Approach Working? “So, is this new approach, which is continuing to be scaled up to include more and more customers, really working? It is working for Infor. Solutions based on the public cloud – software as a service customers – have grown at a compound annual growth rate of 28.3% over the past three years. According to the company, for many customers, the speed of the implementation is now often limited by a customer’s ability to handle culture change rather than by integration, data cleansing, or configuration hurdles. There is also evidence it is working for customers. In 2020, Infor SaaS customers had an attrition rate of 8.4%. By 2023, attrition among these customers had fallen to 3.2%. Infor’s strategy for differentiating their business from competitors like SAP and Oracle is to be more industry focused. That industry focus, in turn, supports a truly differentiated approach to ensuring that their customers get ongoing value from the business applications they have purchased.”

 

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If your Lawson PR160 job status is in “Needs Recovery” or “Is currently running” (because it’s in recovery), see below for the potential fix.

Another error you may encounter is “Ern2 Record Exceeded limit size of 15000”

 

 

Resolution:

  1. Rerun PR140 (If you encounter an error indicating that PR160 is currently running when rerunning PR140, you should restart PR00 by performing a “double delete.”)
    1. “Double Delete” means going to PR00 and hitting the delete button twice until you clear out * and R flags
  2. Run PR160 with the Earnings Record NOT equal to blank after clearing flags in PR00

 

Hope this was helpful!

With the increasingly rapid growth of cloud the cloud platform for end-user technology, especially in enterprise resource planning (ERP), there may be some confusion whether or not a company’s system is cloud-native or simply just cloud hosted. And yes, there is a difference. Simply put, cloud-native applications are created in the cloud, utilizing the full power of cloud architecture to transcend traditional application restrictions. Cloud-hosted applications are traditional applications that have been migrated to the cloud and are not designed to take full advantage of the cloud. So, which one does your organization have and which is better to use? Robert Jolliffe President at Sabre Limited, shares an article on Spiceworks.com of four characteristics that distinguish cloud-hosted ERP solutions from cloud-native ones. Jolliffe notes that there are some common characteristics you should observe, but still major differences. Cloud-native ERP systems should have these (and maybe more) features:

  1. Serverless Design. “These technologies are serverless. The customer does not need a server, and the technology runs in a public cloud. I think the best of them have dual-use rights (so you can also choose to run them on your own infrastructure). These systems use single sign-on through Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc. Customers usually pay through a monthly subscription model, but that defines its economics, not the technology.”
  2. Cloud Native Technology is Device Agnostic. “Any cloud-native technology is, by its nature, device agnostic. A cloud-native ERP system runs on any hardware platform and any operating system. Even Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 ERP systems (Business Central and Finance and Operations) can run on a Mac, a Chromebook, a Pixel, or Android Phone. They speak “swipe and pinch” and recognize Bluetooth printers. They have native apps in all the major app stores.”
  3. Cloud-Native is App Friendly. “Whether it is Salesforce, Netsuite, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 product line, or any other cloud-native line-of-business system, they all support some private app store. The design of these technologies is open and easily integrated. It’s the design philosophy that exploded the use of the iPhone and buried Blackberry.”
  4. Rapid Deployment. “Speaking as someone who spent years selling Dynamics NAV (now in the cloud as Dynamics 365 Business Central), cloud-native ERP is deployed with virtually zero effort. The onboarding effort is more limited by customers submitting payment methods than any technical element. Old ERP systems could take weeks or months to get hardware in place and software installed. Cloud-native systems can come online by the end of a phone call.”

When you think digital transformation, these days cloud migration comes to mind. This process of moving your enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform to the cloud goes hand-in-hand with transforming your business towards a digital landscape. While it is a clear cut solution and the direction many are already taking, you must still weigh your options and understand certain aspects of cloud migration before starting the move for your business. An informative article on ERP Today shares three things that one should consider before a big ERP move.

“First, you need to decide on cloud technology or a hybrid of cloud and on-premise technology for your ERP system. A hybrid system is typically used by those who already have a pre-existing ERP system in place. It could cost more to maintain in the long run, however a hybrid ERP means you won’t have to rebuild an entirely new system – as you would have to with a cloud-based ERP.”

“The next factor you need to consider is if cloud technology will help leverage AI technology. Short answer: yes. Cloud software will help pave the way for AI tech to take the center stage. Cloud tech better positions everything from your business (data, systems, processes) to be ready for AI tools and functionality. Cloud technology is flexible and versatile; the agility of the technology on hand is why AI functions are so readily available. Insight Software’s Oracle system tools readily take advantage of generative AI to enhance the user experience.”

“Upgrading from old legacy systems to new and improved broaches the final factor you need to think about: how will you migrate data to the cloud? Insight Software’s Angle Professional was created for this specific purpose. Rather than having to import all legacy data, Angle Professional is a cloud data warehouse. It’s a central point to access data and information from multiple, different sources.”

 

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Problem:

So you’re running a Lawson PR160 job (Payment Print) and encounter the “Bad File Status 9 009 error on File TAPE-FILE” error. What do you do?

 

Resolution:

First, understand that the error message “Bad File Status 9 009” signifies that either the directory is full or doesn’t exist.

What you will need to do is simple: ensure that a valid path is specified in the PR160 parameters. If there is, double-check that the path is correctly spelled and has sufficient available space in the default location (along with any folder permissions). See the screenshot below for guidance. That’s all there is to it!

 

Infor recently announced that Ruiz Food Products, Inc. (Ruiz Foods), a frozen food manufacturer specializing in Mexican food products, has migrated its entire Infor product platform to the cloud. Per the press release, Infor’s platform helped Ruiz Foods to modernize its operations, especially through the use of scanners, planning tools and data analytics. This was especially important to help Ruiz Foods navigate meaningful changes in product demand brought on by several years of industry disruptions including the Covid-19 pandemic. Ruiz Foods has been an Infor customer for more than 20 years, having utilized a variety of Infor solutions on-premises, including Infor Optiva, M3, Supply Chain Planning, Factory Track, and EPM. However, in 2022 Ruiz Foods’ data center hardware needed to be replaced, requiring a significant capital investment. Thus, the company began with upgrading its Infor PLM for Process (Optiva) into the cloud, providing a way for Ruiz Foods to capture raw materials, subcomponents and finished goods in a way that illuminated product financials. Moreover, Infor’s configurability helps Ruiz Foods react quickly to support the dynamic needs of our customers. The Ruiz Foods’ Supply Chain Planning team uses the Infor planning tools to adapt to an ever changing business environment and manage manufacturing schedules daily. Ruiz Foods looks forward to continuing its 20+ year partnership with Infor to grow and optimize its business.

 

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Problem:

After adding a view to a productline database and adding it to the application productline using dbdef, blddbdict and dbreorg, the blddbdict created  a +dictionary, but the dbreorg -lc does not show anything as being added.

 

Resolution:

Files added in dbdef and assigned a database space defined as “Is View Yes” are treated as views by the dbreorg.

Views are not created or modified in the database by the dbreorg process, therefore, they will not show up in the output list from dbreorg -lc.

The dbreorg -lc only lists structure changes that the dbreorg makes to the database.

Any non-structure changes made to the file definitions are not shown in the dbreorg -lc output.  Non-structure changes are file relation definitions and fields defined as compute, conditional or string.

Another industry where artificial intelligence (AI) is making a splash is the fashion industry – curating creativity and efficiency into design, as well as streamlining production and making shopping more seamless than ever before, according to an article on PYMNTS.com. One powerful tool that AI brings to the table is the data collected by retailers and the analysis that AI can help for forecasting, production efforts and customer relations to name a few areas. Ana Friedlander, NA director of industry solution and strategy, fashion and retail at Infor, says of AI’s utilization, “Using purchase history, market trends, and algorithms coupled with data analysis, companies can offer tailored recommendations to consumers.” In addition, manufacturers also use AI to identify and forecast potential issues in the manufacturing processes, helping to minimize inefficiencies, “AI-driven systems are placed in production facilities to predict the possibility of machine failure, allowing maintenance to be scheduled ahead of time. They use AI-based analytics to help predict demand, optimize production schedules, and the ability to manage inventory in real-time that can mitigate supply chain risks,” Friedlander says. Moreover, AI can also assist in the fashion “drawing board” and generate ideas/designs from mood boards to sketches. Dev Nag, CEO of QueryPal, noted in an interview, “Designers check these samples, often making changes to the tech packs, repeating this process several times until everything is suitable for full production. AI can now help designers at almost any point in this process, even turning mood boards directly into fashion and technical sketches.”

 

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