Archive for category: Frontpage Article

The procurement modules in large ERP systems are great for buying in bulk and keeping stock supplied for your larger purchasing needs.  Usually items are shipped to a receiving dock and are received into the ERP system by the receiving personnel.  This makes doing AP matching viable for these purchases.

What do you do with the items that your local store needs that are not shipped to a warehouse for distribution?  What about when the items are not part of a current contract or even needed on a contract? A store may need light bulbs for their light fixtures, for example, and the local manager has the authority to place an order for them without getting them in his regular warehouse deliveries.  This type of local purchase does not need approval beyond the store manager.  Waiting for a long process to establish a local supplier of light bulbs could leave the store in the dark before the process completes.

You still want these local store purchases to have an approval process that is tracked for audit compliance and a way to know what your commitments are.  How do you deal with these purchases now?  Wouldn’t it be great to have a local purchasing solution that doesn’t require a receiving department and still allows you to know:

Who approved the order

What your total corporate commitments are

Where you purchased something before for when you need to purchase them again

A solution is coming – stay tuned for more information soon!

 

 

 

 

The Data Iterator node is commonly used to loop through records but it can also read a file into IPA. (For more on the Data Iterator Node, visit: https://www.nogalis.com/2017/05/04/ip-designer-series-the-data-iterator-node/)

Based on the responses of seasoned IPA developers on the Infor/Lawson forums, the best way to ‘load’ in a file to an IPA flow is to use a FileAccess node followed by a DataIterator node. This speeds up the flow considerably as the FileAccess node would read the file into memory and then the DataIterator node can use the data from the memory instead of reading and closing the file multiple times.

First ‘load’ or ‘read’ the file into IPA using the FileAccess node. Then set DataIterator to process the Data (and not File) and set the source to be the FileAccess_outputData. This should noticeably improve the performance of the flow as the data is just being loaded into memory once by the FileAccess.

 

Lawson makes it incredibly simple to add users to its reporting wing LBI.

 

First what you want to do is add the LBIUser GROUP to the user in LSA:

This group may be spelled differently but typically it’s called LBIUSER and is defined when Lawson is first setup for your organization.

 

Once you add this group to the Lawson user. Make sure you save and clear your server cache.

 

Log in to LBI, go to Tools, and under System Administration click “Synchronize Users and Roles”

LBI typically auto-synchronizes once a day but you can manually do it now and you’ll notice the users and roles will be the same after your sync them.

The user should be able to login into LBI but likely won’t be able to access much if reports, dashboards, and links are assigned additional Lawson groups as a means of restricting access. Again, these are called “roles” in LBI but “groups” in Lawson.

 

There is also a matter of bursting reports to the user which is another form of security that will be outlined in another article.

During a recent IFS install we encountered an install failure and the error message/return code was blank. The setup_log.log file said “Error: IFS -DoInstall failed with a return code of”.  We noticed that the setup_log.log claimed that it had created the new database successfully, but the database was not there. After much troubleshooting, we finally realized that we needed some inbound/outbound firewall rules for our IFS database instance. The interesting thing is that the install wizard made it past the database connection screen, but once we added those firewall rules, we were good to go.

Troubleshooting Infor/Lawson issues can be tricky at times due to the scarcity of resources online. Finding an Infor specific solution through a standard Google search is usually fruitless. In these cases, the absolute best help usually comes from an Infor Knowledge Base (KB) article or actual Infor documentation as the instructions there are coming straight from the horse’s mouth.

Unfortunately, it can be quite tricky to use the search to find what you are looking for. Even when I know exactly what I’m looking for, I have seen the search results display wildly irrelevant articles. Even when I type the exact title of the KB article, the results sometimes do not show it.

Here are some tips and tricks to help you search through Infor’s Knowledge Base (Full article: KB 1182904)

1. Do you know the ID Number?
   If you have the incident number, KB article ID, or Documentation topic ID on hand, there is no need to mess with search terms at all. Simply search the number and just the number itself to find your article.

   YES
   NO
   

2. Try to favor Singular words over Plural in the Search Phrase
   Infor recommends using singular words in your search phrase for better search results.
3. Using Wildcards in the Search Phrase
   There are two wildcard characters (* and ?) available to use in the search phrase to expand your results. Wildcard characters serve to complete a word when you are not sure of the entire word. Wildcard characters apply to single words and not the entire phrase.

   • Asterisk (*): Adding this to a word will add zero or more characters to the word to look for all words that include the characters provided. For example, searching for term “account*” will return results that start with account but can end with any number of letters after account. Words such as accounts, accounting, accounted would all be included in the search results.

   • Question mark (?): Adding this to a word will add one character to the word to look for all words that include the characters provided. For example, searching for term “?ate” will return results that end in ate but can start with any one letter. Words such as late, date, rate, gate would all be included in the search results. If it was an asterisk instead (*ate), words such as elucidate, satiate, plate would also be included.

   Note: if you use the * in a word in the search phrase and the search engine finds too many matches, you may get no results returned.

4. Using Special Characters
   The only special characters that are considered by the search are:
   • slash (/)
   • dash (-)
   • underscore (_)

   All other special characters (such as !,@,#,$,&) will be replaced by a space when the search is performed. These are not searchable.

5. Types of Searches
   If your search contains just one word, regardless of the setting of the Search Exact Phrase checkbox, an “Exact Phrase” search will be performed. Only those KB articles/Documentation topics that include the word, a form of the word, or a synonym for the word, will be included in the search result. If your search phrase is “execute”, you should expect to see KB articles/Documentation topics including: execute, executed, executing, run, runs, and running in the search result.

If your search contains more than one word and Search Exact Phrase = unchecked, an “All of the Words” search is performed. If there is at least one result that contains all of the words in the search phrase, then the results are displayed. If there are no results that contain all of the words in the search phrase, then an “Any of the Words” search will be performed and all of the KB articles/Documentation topics that contain at least one word in the search phrase will be displayed in the search result.

If your search contains more than one word and Search Exact Phrase = checked, an “Exact Phrase” search is performed. If there is at least one result that contains the exact phrase, then the results are displayed. If there are no results that contain the exact phrase, then an “All of the Words” search is performed. If there is at least one result that contains all of the words in the search phrase, then the results are displayed. If there are no results that contain all of the words in the search phrase, then an “Any of the Words” search will be performed and all of the KB articles/Documentation topics that contain at least one word in the search phrase will be displayed in the search result.

Refer to the Search Terms Match filter on the search result page to see what type of search was performed:

6. Search Exact Phrase Checked vs Unchecked

    If Search Exact Phrase is selected:
• Automatic spell correction is not performed. The search terms are searched as-is.
• “Noise words” are not removed from the search phrase.

    If Search Exact Phrase is NOT selected:
• Automatic spell correction is performed. There will also be a “Search instead for” option to search the original phrase with no correction.
• “Noise words” are removed from the search phrase.

• You can surround a word with double quotes (“”) to avoid auto spell correction and noise word removal.
  
  • The numbers zero through nine (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) are also considered noise words.
• The individual letters of the English alphabet are also considered noise words.

7. Infor General Recommendations
   

• Use the Advanced Search options on the search criteria page only if you know for certain that the search result should include results with only those criteria.
• On the search criteria page, select multiple product lines if you are unsure where an issue might originate.
• When conducting a search, start with a simple search phrase and if too many results are returned, try adding more words to constrain the search result.
• On the search result page, only use the filters on the right if you are certain that the search result should be filtered by those selections. If you are uncertain, you might consider modifying your search phrase.