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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WH110/WH130 – Cannot process loc; allocation feedback running

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So, you have a job failing, possibly a multi-step job and you’ve either ran into the “Cannot process loc” error or something like “Bad File Status 4 7 On File <Filename>”

 

This isn’t allowing the job to run and or pick lists to be printed.

 

  • First make sure you verify with your IT team that this job is not going to run soon again and that none of the other programs are running.
  • Now to resolve this issue, you will need to use a quick paint screen to change the OE-RUN-STS field in the ICLOCATION file from 2 to 0.

The OE-RUN-STATUS values are:

0 – No processing in progress

1- Allocation Feedback Running (WH110)

2- Pick List Print Running (WH130, WH131)

3 – Picking Feedback Running (WH132 – Feedback step 1)

4 – Packing Feedback Running (WH132 – Feedback step 2)

5 – Shipping Feedback Running (WH132 – Feedback step 3)

6 – Ic Reorder Running (IC140, IC141, IC142)  The IT Team can use command such as tmmon to verify.

  • If the job is scheduled to run again automatically, allow it to do so and it should complete and the pick lists should be printed. Make sure other jobs are not scheduled to run around the same time you’re changing the OE-RUN-STATUS.
  • Lastly, if you’re running frequently for the same parameters, change the pgmdef, Execute parameter to Non-Concurrently to ensure the job prior has completed before the next one attempts to run.

Good luck!

Nahdi Medical Company Transforms its Financial Management with Infor

Infor recently announced that Nahdi Medical Company, a Saudi Arabia-based pharmacy retail chain, has digitally transformed its financial management, payment systems, and financial planning with Infor Treasury Management. With the tech giant’s help, this solution allows vast improvements to Nahdi Medical’s financial management and planning capabilities, placing the company in a strong position to expand its operations in line with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 ambition to increase the private sector participation in the provision of healthcare services. Nahdi Medical operates the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’s largest pharmacy retail chain, with a network of pharmacies in all cities and villages across Saudi Arabia, a clinic in Jeddah, and an expanding presence in the UAE. Per the press release, Mohamed Seddeak, head of treasury and corporate finance at Nahdi Medical, said, “By deploying Infor Treasury, we have completely transformed the way our finance department operates. We can now achieve far more with the same resources, while gaining a wealth of data and analysis to help us plan effectively as we expand our operation with medical clinics in Saudi Arabia and new pharmacies in our home market and across the GCC.”

 

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Public Hospitals Authority Modernizes Financial and Supply Chain Systems with Infor

Public Hospitals Authority (PHA) recently selected Infor CloudSuite Healthcare Financial and Supply Chain Management applications. Implemented by Infor’s Consulting Services (ICS) practice, these capabilities will replace PHA’s legacy systems and help improve outcomes in public healthcare delivery in the Bahamas. Per the press release, PHA will use Infor applications to take better control of financial operations in order to control costs and manage margins. They will be able to improve transparency with advanced analytics, consolidate data from disparate sources, reconcile for period-end closings, and benefit from increased visibility into activities that impact finances across the enterprise. In addition, supply chain capabilities will allow users to automate the procure-to-pay process. PHA will also be able to spend less time on administration and more time on securing reliable suppliers, negotiating competitive pricing, and driving sustainable cost savings.

 

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