Why You Need Diversity On Your Team And 4 Ways To Build It

What makes for an unstoppable team? One word: diversity. Trello writer Kat Boogaard states that a diverse team is composed of a variety of different people from various backgrounds, viewpoints, and experiences. Research shows that being intentional about building a diverse team leads to a number of different benefits. Boodaard outlines three advantages of a diverse team.

  1. Diversity Breeds Creativity And Innovation.
  2. Diversity Leads To Better Return On Investment.
  3. Diverse Teams Have Better Employee Recruitment And Retention.

Diversity matters, but you must build on it to keep your team dynamic strong. Boogaard outlines four ways to accomplish this:

  1. Rethink “Culture Fit”
  2. Check Your Biases
  3. Take A Close Look At Your Recruitment Materials
  4. Don’t Forget About Inclusion

Building and supporting a thriving team is no easy task, but the investment in a diverse team culture is easily a more favorable route. Boogaard concludes that while everything from psychological safety to transparent communication are all key ingredients in the recipe for a high-performing team, diversity is the not-so-secret sauce that you quite literally can’t afford to leave out.

 

Original Post by Kat Boogaard at Trello

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3 Reasons Machine Shops are Paying Attention to ERP

Peter Zelinski, Editor-in-Chief of Modern Machine Shop, shares his thoughts in an article on the benefits of utilizing ERP systems in manufacturing. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are software that organizes the different operations of a manufacturing company so that these operations can work smoothly together. Zelinski notes an increase attention to ERP this year, and concludes with three possible reasons:
  1. Acquisition brings systemization in its wake. “Shops are being bought by other companies, often to be merged into larger manufacturing organizations. When this happens, the context that needs to give way is the shop’s tribal knowledge. ERP implementation, or the shift to greater reliance on ERP, is a natural means to a more transparent process.”
  2. Slowdowns free attention for disruption. “Shops have varied this year in their activity levels, but for some, business has softened. The quieter time can bring opportunity. Having some attention free, and having margin in terms of the availability of people’s time and equipment capacity, provides the chance to make messy changes. And commitment to ERP is a change that is inherently messy, because it involves changing individual work habits that have come to feel comfortable.”
  3. Hiring is not getting any easier. “The seeming shortage of skilled employees is a problem that will not go away, and the special uncertainty of 2020 only complicates the matter. A shop now is liable to be reluctant to staff up even if could easily do so. The tools within a good ERP system, perhaps the very system the shop has been underusing all this time, provide the means of holding staff constant but allow each staff member’s time and attention to be used more effectively.”

Zelinski concludes with how much impact the current economic situation is to our decisions to use such systems like ERP. “Working in the time of COVID-19 has reminded us of the value of people, and it has taught us we have useful digital tools for connecting and collaborating that were just waiting for us to need them.”

 

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Cisco VPN not connecting – simple fix without a reboot

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We provide several customers with our MSP services in Lawson and often are switching between several VPNs throughout the day. Our VPNs are fairly reliable but every once in a while, they fail to connect and only a reboot seems to resolve. Unfortunately, this means closing all of our current tasks and documents that are open and essentially stepping out of our work flow.

 

Follow these steps below to resolve your CISCO VPN connection issue:

  1. Close CISCO VPN by right clicking it in the bottom right Windows tray bar
  2. Open windows task manager with CTRL + SHIFT + ESCAPE
  3. Go to services and find vpnagent

  4. Right click it and select STOP, wait for it to stop completely.
  5. Right click it again and select START
  6. Open Cisco VPN again and try to connect once more. That’s it!

If you’re still having issues, it may be the VPN server you’re connecting to in which you’ll have to reach out to a dedicated Windows team for that client. Good luck!

 

Russell Roof Tiles Upgrades and Extends with Infor

Russell Roof Tiles (RRT) recently extended its investment in Infor technology and completed its upgrade to a multi-tenant instance of Infor CloudSuite Industrial. With a cloud upgrade, this will provide the potential for RRT to reduce their budget within accounts administration and invoice processing, removing the need for third-party integration software. Per the press release, RRT has made substantial time savings throughout invoice filing and proof-of-delivery processes as well as enabling complete, remote customer access to orders and account information including computer-aided design (CAD) drawings. Long-range production planning and maintenance management have also helped automate the purchasing of parts to boost efficiencies and reduce downtime on the shop floor.

 

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Infor Develops Contactless Ordering Solution for Hospitality Industry

Infor recently introduced “Infor OrderNow”, a new contactless ordering solution to help the hospitality industry better navigate the operational challenges in the current pandemic, while supporting the dining revenue stream in the future. This application is an extension of Infor’s hospitality suite, namely Infor POS, providing an adaptation of changes in customer purchase behavior that also provides organizations with a tool to address declining revenue challenges. Per the press release, Infor OrderNow’s responsive web application is easy to deploy in a wide variety of hospitality industry segments. It is easily embeddable in a customer’s own web environment, and because an app download is not required, it is quickly and easily adopted by guests for immediate uptake.

 

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4 Ways a CRM Can Improve the Customer Experience

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are commonly used by sales teams to manage brand reputation and customer engagement. There are three types of CRMs: Operational, analytical, and collaborative. While all three types share common functionalities (contact management for storing information, interaction tracking for customer behavior history, and lead management for lead conversion), they all have areas where customer experience can be improved. Scott Clark, Web technology and SEO expert, shares an article on CMS Wire of four areas to utilize your CRM system for improved customer experience.

CRMs Allow Brands to Form Better Relationships With Customers. “Many CRMs provide the ability to send automated emails to customers, enabling a brand to remain in touch with a customer through personalized emails that deliver relevant content, offers, coupons, seasonal promotions, and incentives.”

A CRM Can Improve Customer Service. “CRMs provide instant access to every interaction that the customer has had with a brand, including chat history, purchase history, and customer service tickets. This enables customer service support staff to instantly pull up the customer’s details while they are interacting with them.”

Faster Response Time. “Many CRMs are using AI and process automation to identify customer sentiment through analytics, and facilitate more rapid responses to customer service inquiries and even social media posts. Brands are able to instantly respond to customer complaints and eradicate customer pain points before they can cause damage.”

Personalize Customer Communications. “By studying customer demographics, online browsing behaviors, purchasing habits, and social interactions, CRMs facilitate customer segmentation to a finer degree, which allows a brand to better determine how it approaches each customer.”

 

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Lawson Addins is not working with ADFS

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You have ADFS setup on your server but addins is not working though the user is setup in Lawson with the proper security and addins flag enabled.

Steps to resolve:

  1. First make sure you have the proper URL in Addins
  2. ADFS is more strict so in most cases a secured port is required
  3. If your login is failing with this login box below, ADFS may not be authenticating correctly.
  4. Include port as seen in this example URL https://servername.organization-domain.com:1447
  5. The login box will appear differently as seen below:
  6. If your still having issue and the login page does nothing once the proper credentials are entered. Verify the user has a Thick Client identity assigned in Lawson Security Administrator.

TIP: The password for the thick client identity can be anything. As long as it is filled, it should allow ADFS to authenticate with addins. Good luck!

 

John Keells Logistics Optimizes Operations Visibility with Infor

Sri Lankan logistics giant John Keells Logistics will leverage Infor WMS warehouse management system and Infor Birst to digitize and optimize its logistics value chain, enhancing the visibility of its logistics operations, optimizing costs and increasing productivity. Per the press release, John Keells Logistics will utilize Infor WMS and Infor Birst intelligence and analytics solutions to automate most of its business functions. This will enable the company to enhance business efficiencies and productivity and thus improve its bottom line. JKLL’s Chief Executive Officer Randula Chandrarathne says of the tech giant, “What sets Infor’s solution apart from other competing offerings is the company’s deep logistics expertise and industry-specific capabilities. With this solution, we can now automate previously labor-intensive and time-consuming processes, thereby improving productivity and optimizing costs.”

 

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Kingspan Water and Energy UK Standardizes on Infor

Kingspan has successfully deployed Infor LN enterprise resource planning (ERP) to help improve customer service, reduce inventory and accelerate the integration of new acquisitions to further grow their company. Infor LN is now live for 500 users across 11 sites across Ireland, Northern Ireland and England, and was achieved with no disruption to operations. Infor alliance partner Merino Services managed the deployment, which is hosted via Kingspan’s own private cloud. Per the press release, Kingspan chose Infor based on the strong multi-site and planning functionality within Infor LN, despite other companies in the Kingspan Group using different ERP technologies. Another critical aspect of this decision was Infor’s commercial flexibility and the depth of the support the vendor was able to offer. Infor LN will be complemented by Infor CPQ configure-price-quote solution, which will help allow product options to be intelligently selected at time of order entry, Infor Factory Track to help improve inventory movement and receipt of production, and Infor Birst for daily KPI monitoring. Kingspan’s field service organization, which is comprised of around 50 contractors and engineers, will use mobile service applications integrated into Infor LN.

 

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Bio Partner Schweiz AG Chooses Industry-Specific Multi-Tenant Cloud Solution from Infor

Bio Partner Schweiz AG recently chose to implement Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, replacing the current on-premise enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The CloudSuite will support the company’s continued growth by bringing many food industry-specific features to standard deployment and consolidate internal processes. The implementation will be done by Infor alliance partner Maximum Solution Consulting Group GmbH (MSC). Per the press release, the company has experienced strong growth in recent years in line with the trend towards organic and sustainable food — and accordingly the challenges facing the business have increased, particularly in terms of working with customers and additional value-added opportunities. The previous ERP system was no longer able to keep up with their growth, thus switching to Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage to meet the needs of the food and beverage industry, providing a range of features to help streamline global supply chains and accelerate processes.

 

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