10 cloud ERP implementation challenges during COVID-19

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) cloud systems can help your company create digital transformation and open the door for more opportunities. There are a few challenges that take place, however, when implementing a new system – especially in the current economic struggle. Eric St-Jean shares an article on TechTarget of 10 cloud ERP implementation challenges during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

  1. Resistance. Stakeholders may not want to move forward with an ERP implementation because of the pandemic. To mitigate this resistance, you need to show how the ERP project will save the company money, position your organization to increase revenues, or both. Explain that you can mitigate some of that uncertainty, however, by using the tools and strategies of past implementations for today’s reality.
  2. Employees distracted with personal responsibilities. With schools and day cares closed, many employees now have additional responsibilities, such as helping their children with schoolwork and caring for young children. It is best to work with your employees to understand their challenges and find options for them that allow the employees to continue contributing to the project.
  3. Data security. A successful cloud ERP implementation depends on good security, and that can be hard to come by right now. While you may not be able to provide a secure physical work environment for remote workers, you can take steps to mitigate the risk.
  4. Internet and cellphone access. For employees living in the city, getting fast internet access and good coverage on their cellphone can be pretty easy. For employees who live in remote areas, these can be challenging and costly
  5. Hardware needs. Depending on the functionality you are implementing, employees developing and testing the ERP system may need to have access to hardware, such as scanners.
  6. Sudden illness. Even under normal circumstances, there’s always the risk that a member of the team will fall ill. To prepare for the worst-case scenario, you should have employees document their work and update their status on a regular basis.
  7. Training. It will be important to have different training methods available to employees, such as live training over videoconferencing software, documentation, tip sheets and e-learning.
  8. Multiple time zones. Some of your ERP implementation team members may work in other countries and time zones, which presents challenges when scheduling meetings. Try to arrange core hours where everyone is available.
  9. Meetings without body language. Someone’s physical reaction to information they are receiving or sharing can often give clues about how the person feels on the topic. With so much information sharing now being done remotely, it’s not always possible to see a person’s physical reaction.
  10. Communication. With so many employees working remotely, it’s even more important to develop a good communication plan at the outset of the project.

 

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Infor Landmark Security Roles (ST) explained

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From time to time you may get inquiries from a client’s audit team about Landmark Security Roles. This overview table helps explain their uses assuming no modifications were made to them by the organization or Infor. To see a more in-depth understanding of Landmark classes, see our article: “Infor Landmark Security Classes (ST) explained”

 

Delivered role Intended for use by Contains these security classes
InbasketUser_ST Normal end-users who receive work items in the Inbasket BasicProductLineAccess_ST

ProductLineAccess_ST InbasketUser_ST

Lpa_ST ProcessSchedulingAllAccess_ ST
JobQueueServer_ST Users who must perform actions on the Landmark job queue. BasicProductLineAccess_ST

ProductLineAccess_ST JobQueueAccess_ST
ProcessDesigner_ST Process developers BasicProductLineAccess_ST ProductLineAccess_ST

Lpa_ST

ProcessDesigner_ST ProcessSchedulingAllAccess_ ST
ProcessServerAllAccess_ST IPA system administrators BasicProductLineAccess_ST ProductLineAccess_ST

Lpa_ST

LpaAdmin_ST ProcessServerAllAccess_ST ProcessSchedulingAllAccess_ ST ScheduledActionsAccess_ST
ProcessServerReadAccess_ST IPA assistant administrators, power users, developers (depending on policies at

your site)

 ProductLineAccess_ST

ProcessServerReadAccess_ST
Not delivered through a role. Assign the class to any role for users who need to assign proxies. Users who need to assign Tasks to other users to cover for them. ProcessAutomationProxy_ST
ConfigConsoleSecurityAdmin_ST Users who need full access to the Configuration Console. ConfigAdminAccess_ST

SecurityConfigAccess_ST

ConfigConsoleSecurityAdmin_ ST

 

Three Ways To Successfully Integrate New Technology Into Employee Workflow

The Forbes Council shares three ways to integrate new or different technology into your team’s workflow environments. If done well, your team can achieve success while taking advantage of new technologies.

  1. Empower your employees and make them ‘beta’ testers. Galvanize your employees into being a part of the process of enhancing this new tech. Give them the chance to feel as if they are making the product better — because they are.
  2.  Hold training sessions, and set aside time to make the learning curve less steep. It takes a team effort to make a new product work to the best of its ability. Understand there will be a learning curve, but it’s possible to successfully get your team on board and excited about something new and different.
  3. Don’t reinvent the wheel. No matter what change you’re introducing — whether it be new tech or switching up another aspect of your business process — don’t lose sight of what you and your employees do best.

 

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RAKWA Boosts Water Sustainability in UAE with Infor EAM

Ras Al Khaimah Wastewater Agency (RAKWA) has deployed Infor EAM (enterprise asset management) to boost the efficiency and improve water sustainability in the UAE. RAKWA is the public utility charged with collecting and treating 12 million cubic meters of wastewater generated each year in Ras Al Khaimah. Per the press release, Intertec, Infor’s technology partner in the UAE, implemented Infor EAM at RAKWA in mid-2018. The deployment took about six months. More than 3,300 assets have now been logged and entered into the system. RAKWA could use Infor EAM to fully automate its asset maintenance, including daily schedules for the O&M team advising which assets to proactively check, repair, maintain or replace. In its next phase, RAKWA is exploring options to fully digitize its operations by implementing IoT technology, which would give the organization real-time insights into the functioning of its operations.

 

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Lawson Add-ins is Not Working, Here’s What to Check For

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If your Lawson Add-ins is not working, check the following:

  1. Check the versioning of Excel, if you’re using 2010 or 2016, the MOA installer will vary.
    • For MOA installer versions, you can research this on docs.infor.com and or search the downloads section within Infor concierge website.
  2. If add-ins is not working after installing, go to Excel options and check for “Disabled Application Add-ins”
  3. If Add-ins is disabled here, under Managed, select Disabled Items >> Go
  4. Access COM Add-ins and make sure Lawson MOA is enabled:

 

That’s it! Steps 2 through 4 are examples of Lawson Add-ins in Excel 2010.

10 Key CRM Functions and How They Help

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems have become a must-need tool in business. Today,  CRM software aids in customer data, retention, integration, marketing, lead generation and much more. Gitanjali Maria shares an article on softwareadvice.com of 10 key CRM software functions useful for every business.

  1. Lead management – Lead management functionality ensures that you don’t lose any leads and that you score and qualify leads correctly.
  2. Contact management – Contact management involves recording customers’ details, such as name, phone number, address, and social media handle, in a searchable database.
  3. Email – Email management offers the ability to send mass emails, track email conversations with clients, plan drip email campaigns, and send automated emails to clients for events such as birthdays or anniversaries.
  4. Reporting and analytics – Reporting and analytics is required across all major business functions that CRM supports—sales, marketing, customer service, field service, ecommerce, and more.
  5. Marketing – Marketing-related inquiries mainly revolved around the ability to segment and nurture leads, prepare and launch marketing campaigns, track campaign optimization, and support social media marketing.
  6. Pipeline management – Sales pipelines help visualize the sales cycle and identify where in the sales funnel a particular deal is.
  7. Workflow automation – Workflow automation allows you to create intelligent workflows using logic or rules, such as if-then-else, to automate repetitive tasks, including following up on leads, raising invoices, and sending emails.
  8. Document management – Document management lets you create, access, edit, and share files with colleagues or clients directly from the CRM system.
  9. Quotes/proposal management – This feature helps create and send quotes and proposals directly from your CRM solution.
  10. Forecasting – Forecasting in CRM helps estimate your future sales or revenue based on present and past data trends.

 

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Chuo Spring Adopts Infor ERP Solution at Overseas Sites to Improve Business Visibility and Standardize Operations Globally

Infor Japan K.K., Japanese subsidiary of Infor, recently announced that Chuo Spring Co., Ltd., an automotive components manufacturer, has adopted at its Indonesian sites Infor CloudSuite Industrial, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for manufacturing industries. This will enhance business visibility and standardize its operations globally. Per the press release, Chuo Spring made the decision to use Infor CloudSuite Industrial as a dedicated core system for its overseas sites, and deploy the solution in its Indonesian sites, in recognition of its ability to adapt Japanese standardized operations to sites overseas and support centralized management and global operations from its Japanese head office. Kenta Koide, vice president, member of the board, Chuo Spring Co., Ltd., says of this adoption, “To enable continued expansion at Chuo Spring, we needed an ERP solution to visualize our overseas site data in real time and enable data-driven business decisions. In addition to the rich functionality and proven achievements for global manufacturing businesses offered by Infor’s ERP solution, we were impressed with its versatility, flexible licensing structure, and development environment enabling easy implementation and meeting local requirements.”

 

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Lawson appears to be down or not working properly, what do I do?

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Here are 5 things you can check for when seeing what is wrong with Lawson:

  1. Contact the different departments within the organization to confirm this is a wide spread issue. Coordinated with them to report back issues they are seeing.
  2. If users can’t access Lawson portal, check to see if websphere is running.
    1. If you have access to the LSF server, go into services and check if the IBM Websphere ServerApp service is running. Stopping and starting the ServerApp is typically safe as well if you’re trying to prevent users from logging in.
    2. If websphere is running, check for IOS log errors found in %LAWDIR%\system
  3. If you’re able to access Lawson portal but users report intermittent issue, check the LADB and LATM log.
    1. On the LSF server, go to %LAWDIR%\system directory and open the ladb.log and latm.log and search for “Database error (94)” or “Connection Failure” errors. Make sure the time stamps lineup.
  4. Check the Lawson job scheduler or reach out to your database team to check for any scripts running on the server.
    1. Its rarer but an update job or sql script could cause intermittent connection issues within Lawson if its hogging all the database or LSF server resources.
    2. Its also important to verify there is nothing important running if you’re thinking of rebooting the either servers.
  5. After doing the above checks and coordinating with the organization, if Lawson is still exhibiting issues and you’re seeing errors, it’s always best to reboot both the Lawson database server along with the LSF server.
    1. A simple way to do this would be to open up a command prompt or powershell in administration mode and type: shutdown -r -t 0

How to protect ERP data when access to corporate networks is both ubiquitous and for sale on the dark web

With the current pandemic, remote working has become a new norm for the majority of the workplace. With this new way of doing things, networks may be vulnerable to malicious acts in software viruses and especially information gathering in the dark web. Piyush Pandey shares an article on SecurityMagazine.com how to protect your enterprise resource planning (ERP) data in these conditions. Ensuring ERP data security, privacy and compliance can no longer rely solely on network threat monitoring. It requires layed identity defense to limit access to and within mission-critical appliances.

Here are some ways to protect your ERP data from being sold to networks in the dark web:

Start with securing your crown jewel ERP systems. “Organizations looking to accelerate their data security maturity can choose to lock down access across their ERP systems for a “quick win.” According to the 2020 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 67 percent of 2019 data breaches arose from credential theft, social engineering attacks, or errors that enabled malicious actors to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data.”

Continuously monitor privileged user activity and behavior. “With Attribute-based access controls (ABAC), organizations can set fine-grained access controls that mitigate risks. Privileged users, such as system administrators, need superuser access to do their jobs. While ABAC provides some level of control that can limit the data they access, their job functions require them to add users, delete payees and engage in other potentially risky activities across the ERP ecosystem.”

Creating layered defense at the identity perimeter to strengthen data security. “By establishing dynamic, attribute-based controls, companies can more precisely define access to ERP resources. Data masking or hiding sensitive information not necessary to the job function creates an additional security layer. Users not only are limited in their access but by masking the data, the access granted eliminates excess access risks associated with visibility of unnecessary, sensitive data. An organization’s payroll manager may not need to see employees’ account information to process the payments. Thus, limiting access and masking data create a double layer of defense.”

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Infor Asia Pacific Announces Strong Partner Momentum in Southeast Asia

Infor recently shared its Asia Pacific (APAC) partner momentum in FY20 with the strategic addition of 35 new channel and alliance partners across the region. These partners are specially recruited according to their focused industry-specific expertise and solution areas mapped and aligned to Infor’s go-to-market strategy. Per the press release, about 35% of these new partners are located in Southeast Asia, including 3MWorks Corp., novaHEALTH, Phitomas, and KMS Solutions. They will bolster Infor’s go-to-market presence in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. The recent additions to its partner network has contributed to the adoption of Infor CloudSuite Industrial by Indonesia customer Ismaya Group, a leader in building lifestyle brands in the hospitality and lifestyle industries. Fabio Tiviti, VP of Infor ASEAN, says “APAC is our fastest-growing region, and we are witnessing an increasing appetite for industry-specific SaaS solutions in Southeast Asia. The growing momentum of our partner network brings us closer to our customers, and we are confident we will remain the trusted partner of choice in this region.”

 

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