If you’ve ever come across the following problem below, follow this quick guide to solve it.

 

Problem:

Users receive error messages when they are running jobsf. The errors are indicating that the CKPOINT table does not exist after the system admin completed a productline copy.

 

Resolution:

Simply put, the CKPOINT file did not get copied over during the copy procedure. Run the following commands to add the CKPOINT table into the productline:

bldckp productlinename

blddbdict productlinename

 

Stop the WebSphere Application Server

dbreorg productlinename

Have the users login and try to run their jobs again. Your error message is now resolved.

 

Steve Brooks, joint Editor at Enterprise Times and Senior analyst at Synonym Advisory, shares insights from ERP vendors and their prediction of technology impacts in Manufacturing in 2024.

  • Acumatica. – Debbie Baldwin, director of product management and manufacturing, at Acumatica, sees AI-enabled automation as key in 2024. She noted, “There are several ways manufacturers can embrace AI to their advantage in 2024. For example, utilizing sensor data for preventative maintenance, minimizing costly repairs, leveraging data to optimize production schedules, and employing digital twins for thorough product development simulation.”
  • IFS – Bob De Caux, VP of Automation, IFS, believes, like many others, that 2024 is the year when AI will be widely adopted by manufacturers. He commented, “Manufacturing systems are becoming more complex, so AI-driven data pattern recognition is crucial for sharpening quality control, predicting equipment problems, and optimising production for fewer defects, higher overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and significant cost savings.”
  • Infor – Phil Lewis, Senior Vice President of Solution Consulting, Infor predicted that Intelligent Automation would be the technology that manufacturers look to deliver in 2024. Lewis commented, “Intelligent automation is comprised of RPA and AI. RPA has the potential to replace a great deal of manual, ruled-based, repetitive processes, bringing greater accuracy, faster, and freeing up time for teams to innovate and add value, and apply much needed skills to those areas where gaps exist. Ultimately, this means that production can be planned for with greater insight and accuracy, undertaken in the most efficient way, and with fewer errors to minimize waste and optimize fulfilment.”
  • Rambase – “Rambase, whose Chief Sales Officer, Odd Magne Vea, responded to the questions and presented a very different, though valid, prediction around Cyber Resilience. When asked how manufacturers will develop cyber resilience, he answered, “In the present era of smart factories and digital infrastructure, cyber resilience will become paramount for all manufacturing companies. Ever-increasing connectivity and AI automation expose these enterprises, large and small to heightened cyber threats. A breach can disrupt production, compromise sensitive data, and incur substantial financial losses.  Robust cyber resilience strategies are essential to safeguard against evolving cyber threats, ensuring the uninterrupted operation of any organization which distracts from their true objectives. By prioritizing cybersecurity measures, manufacturing companies can protect intellectual property, maintain customer trust, and fortify the foundation upon which they’ve built their businesses over difficult years and decades.”
  • Rootstock Software – Raj Badarinath, Chief Product & Marketing Officer at Rootstock, believes AI Decisioning will be most adopted by Manufacturers in 2024. He noted, Today, manufacturers are accumulating data at a fast and furious pace. The only way for them to steer through the volume and velocity of this information is with a decisioning platform powered by multi-model AI as their nav system. This new approach—which blends various forms of AI/ML, business intelligence, and predictive capabilities—allows manufacturers to interpret data as incoming signals of demand and supply so they can adjust production capacity for optimal margins. Manufacturers can essentially speed-read market conditions to reliably fulfill customer orders, rapidly convert data into insights and actions, and continually optimize for efficiency and growth.”
  • SAP UKIGreg Moyle, Head of Energy & Discrete Industries, SAP UKI, was surprisingly conservative in his prediction, noting that “Cloud computing” will be the most adopted trend. The prediction may be an indication of the fact that large enterprises are moving to the cloud compared to mid-market organizations. It also, perhaps, reflects the success that the RISE with SAP initiative has had over the last two years. Moyle further explains, “2024 will see the manufacturing industry go ‘all in’ on industry 4.0 technologies. More and more manufacturers will transition to the cloud in order to scale up adoption of new and transformative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things to manage project workloads and improve end-to-end business visibility.”

 

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As a Lawson Managed Service provider, we see many different Lawson v10 systems (even v9 systems) and often we find users with CheckLS = No but get asked if this should be set to Yes.

In the past when migrating clients from LAUA to v9 or v10, CheckLS to Yes would put them on v9 or v10 security instead of LAUA security.

 

Today if you’re on later versions of v10, it’s still the best practice to set CheckLS to Yes in the users RM info but the official Infor documentation reads as follows:

“When you upgrade to 10.0.x, the system will treat this field (checkLS) as set to Yes in all cases”

 

So if you’re scratching your head, what this means is that in v10 and forward, checkLS field Yes or No still puts you on v10 Security. However, setting it to Yes can also give users the ability to access LID if needed (assuming they have ENV access to specific LID command tokens).

 

 

According to IBM’s Institute for business value, around 75% of CEOs believe generative AI (artificial intelligence) is the key to competitive advantage. However, this may be limited in areas such as supply chain where AI could have limited use. Steve Banker, logistics and supply chain management experts, shares an article on Forbes about how business experts have talked about the use of generative AI to improve supply chain system user interfaces. “The idea here is an Alexa type experience where a user asks a question and the technology searches through an application to find the answer, states Banker. “So, a user might ask, ‘who is the supplier on this order.'” The answer: Infor Nexus.

Infor Nexus is a supply chain network that connects businesses to their key partners and makes coordinating the flow of materials and information much more seamless. The solution is particularly strong in creating visibility and coordination of international transport, collaboration with supplier networks and automating trade finance processes. “Infor Nexus’s approach is not to just give a specific answer to a specific question, but to provide the right data visual, in this example a matrix type view of several days of shipments with demurrage risk,” states Banker. Tom Sorgie, the senior vice president of technology at Infor Nexus, calls this rich visual controls. “These visual controls present the information in an intuitive and verifiable way and enable the users to dive right into the data,” says Sorgie. He also adds that the combination of generative AI and a graph database can be powerful.

 

Now is the best time for companies to go over their systems or databases and clean up obsolete data and consider retiring legacy systems. One approach would be to consider migrating from an on-premise enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to a cloud ERP platform. SAP’s Zoryana Zagorodnya shares an article on Forbes stating that with cloud ERP, companies get advanced features, flexibility and accessibility. Not only that, SAP’s CMO Eric van Rossum also adds that with ERP in the cloud, customers expect faster delivery of products and services, nonstop product and service improvements, greater reliability, and lower costs. Additionally, many companies see artificial intelligence (AI) as a powerful game changer when coupled with their cloud ERP systems. According to a recent study conducted by Forbes Advisor, says Zagorodnya, “a significant number of business owners, who currently utilize or intend to integrate AI into their operations reported that 53% employ AI to enhance production processes, while 51% embrace AI for process automation. Embedding AI into end-to-end business processes allows companies to utilize the vast amount of data accessible through modern ERP systems.”

 

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The BATCH privileged user will only be used for standard Lawson batch programs. If the LSF environment is configured to use the BATCH privileged user and a batch job executes a user token with a script goes into “Needs recovery” status with the error: “execjob(laStartProcess): Unable to log in DOMAIN\USERNAME StartStep failed: Overlapped I/O operation is in progress”, then its possible that the users password has been changed or expired on the network.

 

The user’s password for their environment identity found in Lawson Security under User Management MUST match the user’s domain/network/AD password. This is required by user tokens. To resolve this issue so user tokens run to completion, the Lawson Security Administrator will need to update the environment identity password for the user running the job so it matches their OS/AD password, OR the system would need to be configured so the user could enter their own password so it matches their OS/AD password.

Back in 2003, Salling Group implemented Quest PLM (product lifecycle management) and started digitalizing all design and development lifecycle processes, from sketch to store. Since then, Quest PLM has been acquired by Infor, and in 2016 Salling Group transitioned to the on-premises solution Infor Fashion PLM. In January 2023, the company decided to upgrade to the multi-tenant cloud version of PLM, which was successfully finalized nine months later. Per the press release, Salling Group needed a more flexible and high-performing PLM solution that was future-ready to address the fashion industry’s increasing demands for reporting and sustainability. Infor’s Cloud-Based PLM suite was just the solution. Additionally, Ptex Solutions, based in India, helped Salling Group implement the cloud-based Infor PLM for Fashion. The company is responsible for 90 percent of Infor’s PLM implementations worldwide. Previously, Ptex had also implemented on-premises PLM at Salling Group, so the team was familiar with their requirements. Moreover, according to Karen Tretow-Loof, users are extremely surprised by the short implementation phase and the intuitive, personalized user interface. “Usually, when you go live, a lot of bugs pop up that need to be fixed. But this time, there were very few bugs. It has to do with us being good at testing, but even more so with Ptex Solutions being so good at implementing PLM. Their customer-focused approach to implementation has contributed to success throughout the entire organization, which is why we have credited the overall project a score of 10/10,” she says.

 

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There may be an instance when you are getting an error in Lawson Security Administrator (LSA) stating that the “Data area has been suspended”. This happens when you are adding a rule to a security class. This error usually occurs after running dbreorg without stopping your LSF WebSphere Application Server prior to the execution of dbreorg.

To resolve this issue, follow the steps below:

  1. Stop LSF WebSphere Application Server
  2. Stop LSF WebSphere Node Agent
  3. Stop LSF WebSphere Deployment Manager
  4. Make sure that there are no java processes
  5. Stop your LSF environment
  6. Start LSF WebSphere Deployment Manager
  7. Start LSF WebSphere Node Agent
  8. Start LSF WebSphere Application Server
  9. Start your LSF environment

When we integrate security and IT operations, cybersecurity becomes increasingly important and should be at the top of your list to maintain and set in place. There are Recently CrowdStrike announced new offerings that may change how cybersecurity and IT operations unify to harness the power of generative AI (artificial intelligence) to protect against breaches more effectively. Tony Bradley, tech expert and  Editor-in-Chief of TechSpective, shares an article on Forbes on how systems like CrowdStrike harnesses the power of AI for your cybersecurity. Bradley notes that at the heart of CrowdStrike’s new suite is Charlotte AI, a conversational AI that promises to transform how security teams interact with their cybersecurity tools. By leveraging foundational AI models, Charlotte AI enables security analysts at all levels to ask complex queries in plain language and receive actionable insights in real time. In addition, with the increasing popularity of AI comes an increased (if not more) risk of data sensitivity and data exposure. How so do we manage this? Bradley states that “CrowdStrike is striving to address this risk with enhancements to Falcon Data Protection, which has been updated to prevent data leakage to web-based, commercial generative AI tools. By providing comprehensive policies that track content movement and prevent unauthorized sharing or uploading, Falcon Data Protection aims to address a gap in traditional Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions.” Lastly, with AI in cybersecurity, there can be a unified front against cyber threats. “CrowdStrike’s latest offerings represent a strategic move towards a more integrated, AI-powered approach to cybersecurity and IT operations,” notes Bradley. “Unifying these traditionally separate domains under a single platform and leveraging the power of generative AI can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of security and IT teams.”

 

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology that helps organizations save time, reduce costs and improve operational efficiency. With this transformative technology available, tech leaders might wonder how it can help with optimizing cloud storage. Julia Borgini, freelance technical copywriter and content marketing strategist, shares an article on TechTarget showing how AI is capable of expanind how cloud storage providers handle storage, maintenance and forecasting. Borgini explains, “AI most easily integrates into cloud storage for monitoring, diagnostics and predictive analysis in storage infrastructure and applications. AI can help with automated management and configuration, fault prevention, predictive resource and capacity planning, intelligent data management, and enhanced data security.” Additionally, she points out how many cloud storage vendors use AI in their platforms so customers could understand how it is used before signing up. Other best practices include seeing if the AI tools need access to user data on the hardware and software level in order for it to work properly. Lastly, Borgini suggests exploring dynamic and flexible pricing options that support customer business requirements without surprises. For many it means a pay-for-use subscription model that includes service-level agreements and guarantees that meet customer expectations.

 

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