Microsoft says AI and VR could help future students focus better

Tech giant Microsoft has tapped into the education sector and envisions the future of the classroom will be digitally advanced more than ever before. With video conferencing, tablets, computer labs, PowerPoint (and other office suites), mobile applications and more already embedded in the modern school system, Microsoft sees two other already known technologies that can make strides in the classroom – Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR). Daphne Leprince-Ringuet shares an article on ZDNet about Microsoft’s intentions of the future of education. Dubbing the future as “hybrid intelligence”, this combination of human and machine intelligence is meant to expand human intellect, rather than replace it. According to the article, Microsoft claims this shift will happen via “meaningful” interactions between students and technology, which will “help students do an even better job at what they already do best.” Daniel McDuff, a researcher at Microsoft, says that “the collaboration between humans and AI could give us almost superhuman powers to learn.” Additionally,  using AI will help us understand how students works collaboratively, thus in certain situations highlight the need for a group leader in a class group, or spot unconscious biases happening when pupils interact.  Leprince-Ringuet says that hybrid intelligence technologies have myriad other applications in the classroom, some of them already grounded in 2020 technology. They include AR and VR tools, for example, which lets students, in McDuff’s words, “use tech in the moment rather than be glued to a screen.” VR is already helpful in other interests such as video games, movies, music, and other popular meda and tech. If there is a future for the education sector in the digital roadmap, Microsoft believes hybrid intelligence is the path they should take.

 

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How to dump RQ02 approval strings out of a Lawson database

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Lawson RQ02 approval strings work hand in hand with Landmark and are setup in different ways per organization. Some use general hierarchal titles and some use individual usernames. Regardless of how you implement it, you want to be able to create a report so you can update them as individuals join/leave/move around the organization

To generate a database dump of all approval strings and their levels using my method, you’ll need read access rights to the LSL database and must be using SQL.

  1. Login to your TEST or PROD database application.
  2. Create a new query window and paste the below SQL code in, one is a screenshot to show syntax highlights and the other is the raw code for your convenience.

  3. Run the query, copy and paste with headers into Excel to filter down the data or edit the query.

I’ve renamed various column names to reflect the different levels and dollar amounts more clearly. Feel free to change the query to your liking. This is only the RQ02 strings, to get the filters for users’ setup in Landmark, check out my article titled: “Generating a simple approval level report from the Landmark database”.

How Technology Is Improving Physician Satisfaction

Healthcare has seen a recent surge in IT and digital advancement since the early days of digital hospitals in the early 2000s. Electronic-health record (EHR) systems were a huge turning point and since then the industry has continued to invest and dip their hands in technology to optimize their practices. George Mathew, Chief Medical Officer at Americas for DXC Technology, shared an article on Forbes explaining how technology is helping physicians provide a better patient experience and optimal efficiency in their operations. While first and foremost physicians are trained to be care providers they must also be on top of their EHRs for all their patients. Fortunately with the advancement of technology in the medial field, there are digital solutions that will make their data entry systems much faster and easier in making better care decisions for their patients.

Understanding The End-User – Mathew points out to help improve physician user experience and operational workflows, health care technology vendors have started applying persona-oriented design to their systems. Persona-based user interfaces and workstations are geared toward enhancing the workflow of specific health care professionals, such as a doctor in a clinic or a nurse in an intensive care unit. Not to mention the available mobile applications helping them with real time information.

Intelligent Interfaces Enrich The Care Experience – Again, Mathew says that digital advances are making it possible for technology vendors to create ambient physician user interfaces that adapt and respond to their users’ needs. These interfaces use machine learning algorithms to automatically search, filter and present relevant context-based information based on, for example, a patient-doctor conversation. When used in a clinical setting, this technology can help ensure providers are given the right data at the right time to lead to the right decision and that patients are empowered to understand and use health information to achieve better health outcomes and management.

 

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How to Restrict a Specific Form Table Field in Lawson Portal

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For this tutorial, we will be restricting a table in CU01.1

  1. Login into Lawson Security Administrator
  2. Load up your default security profile typically titled PROD10 or TEST10
  3. Add a new security class

    Ours will be called TestSecClass
  4. Grant token access to CU01.1
  5. Once this is added, we want to restrict a specific table on CU01.1 to find the table name, go to CU01.1 and press CTRL + SHIFT + O when selecting the field
  6. Back in LSA, set CUC-CURRENCY-CODE to Deny Any Access
  7. Add this new class to a role of your choice. Add the role to a user and test CU01.1. To learn more about how Lawson security handles access, check out my other article titled: “Lawson Security – The Theory of Least Privilege Access Explained”

Corrective Services NSW Selects Infor to Achieve Critical Workforce Utilisation Efficiencies

Infor recently announced that Corrective Services NSW (CSNSW) has chosen Infor CloudSuite Workforce Management to future-proof aspects of its scheduled staff rostering needs. With a competitive market process, Infor’s comprehensive workforce management solution and associated business process changes will provide efficient and effective staff scheduling procedures and ongoing workforce utilization efficiencies. Per the press release, the industry-leading workforce scheduling system will deliver a host of benefits to Corrective Services NSW, including providing live scheduling monitors in key locations that enhance staff safety and security, continually adapting its workforce scheduling approach to new business models, and mitigating the risk of potential compliance errors by ensuring team members are rostered and paid in compliance with their respective Public Sector Awards.

 

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Pechanga Resort Casino Drives Automation and Visibility with Infor CloudSuite

Recently Pechanga Resort Casino entered into an agreement with Infinium Software Inc., an Infor company, expanding their long-term partnership with the tech giant. Pechanga, the largest resort/casino on the West Coast, chose Infor CloudSuite solutions to further integrate core business processes into a centralized location connected to the reservation department. The integration will allow the resort/casino to make more informed business decisions from anywhere, anytime, on any device. Per the press release, Pechanga will implement Infor CloudSuite solutions created specifically for the hospitality industry to better support financials, supply management, human capital management, analytics, and workforce management. These flexible applications can provide business leaders with new insights and real-time data to make decisions quickly that may improve bottom-line results. With Infor solutions, teams at Pechanga will benefit from a simple and predictable path to upgrade from on-premise applications to the cloud.

 

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Creating an LBI Dashboard Series – Getting Started (Part 1)

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LBI dashboards are useful for delegating reports to specific access and is essentially a frontend for all your user reporting needs.

For this part in the series, we will be going over the very basics and how to create a dashboard tab for Finance users and setup access so those users can access the dashboard.

  1. First login into LBI environment as an admin user.
  2. In the top right next to your admins username, you’ll see a gear wheel, click that and select “New Dashboard Tab”
  3. Enter a dashboard title and click OK, ours will be named Finance
  4. You should be redirected to a blank Dasboard, on your new dashboard, click the + sign in the top left and select “EDIT” (note you can select ‘Set Access’ but it’s simpler to go to edit)

  5. A new menu should pop-up with multiple tabs. Go to Sharing and select Edit Viewers for specific access
  6. In this screen you should see a set of users and groups (roles). In LSA, if users have specific groups assigned to their users, adding here will give them access to this dashboard. For our example we will be adding LBI-Payroll group from Lawson:
  7. All users with LBI-Payroll group will now have access to this dashboard. Press okay and Save:

This is the first step in setting up an LBI dashboard for specific users. Please note that LBI comes with a default role that all users must have which is typically called something like LBIUSER. Example below for this article:

Future of networking technology relies on 5G, edge computing

Michaela Goss at Search Networking Tech Target shares an interesting read on the disruptive technologies we can expect in 2020 and in the future of networking technology. Among the top the list as 5G, edge computing infrastructure and WAN technologies. Goss found from other tech bloggers that technologies such as 5G and edge computing will play key roles in network infrastructure transformation, while WAN technologies will continue to grow and thrive.

There is a prediction that the number of enterprise locations that solely use internet WAN connectivity could triple by 2023. In 2019, fewer than 10% of these locations had only internet WAN connectivity, according to Andrew Lerner, research vice president at Gartner. Additionally, the next big thing in the future of networking technology is edge computing, more specifically Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). SASE is a single cloud platform that combines an organization’s network and security services, and Lerner also predicted SASE will see significant growth  in the early 2020s. According to Chris Drake, principal analyst at GlobalData Technology, edge computing promises significant benefits for the future of networking technology. One tech that experts can agree on that will guide us to the next wave of innovation is 5G. 5G will set the stage for the future of networking technology and, in particular, a new type of network model, according to Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. “The new network model is a shift in how operators deal with incremental enhancement and modernization for their networks. Because many 5G deployments will be new strict guidelines and a one-size-fits-all service don’t exist for 5G networks. This drives the need for a new, open network model that will be based more on open source or open hardware capabilities, which vendors will likely attempt to conquer throughout 2020,” says Noelle. Drake concludes, “in 2020, expect more alliances and more use cases that take advantage of the ability to combine edge technologies and 5G network architectures in ways that enable the development and delivery of new digital applications.”

 

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A Brief Overview into the Lawson Requisition and Approval Process

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Lawson allows for requester users to submit requisition orders for their organization. To make sure the orders are valid, Lawson also supports approvers to verify and approve/reject the orders.

The core of this is done by setting up Requisition Locations (RQ01) and Requisition Strings (RQ02) and having a workflow process everything in between.

Requisition Strings can be used in many different ways, but in our example it is to have individual approvers approve for a particular location. This can also be general titles like Manager, VP, etc. or however your organization wants to set it up.

As you can see below, these are strings for Company 100, Requesting Location RQ210 with Approvers starting at Level4 and stopping at Level6. The lower limit on the left is the amount that the users approve orders for and depending on the IPA flow logic, could notify or skip them.

When users track requsitions in say RQ10 for example, they can drill around and see history log via the strings themselves:

This is only half the setup for this particular organization.

 

Approvers have to be setup on the Landmark side via Rich Client or Process Server Administrator web application. This is done via “Filters” and these have to be named accordingly to what your IPA Requisition flow will coincide with.

Below is an example of how we would mirror the RQ02 strings in Rich Client (custom report).

The Level 4, 5, and 6 are the “auth id” that our custom flow matches up on. It then grabs the user from Landmark and send notifications based on where the requisition is in the flow.

Some organizations simply don’t use RQ02 strings as they may find it easier to process everything on the Landmark side.  Landmark does have a set of its own reporting tools and filters (See my other article titled “Generating a simple approval level report from the Landmark database“ for a custom database report I created).

The benefits of RQ02 strings in my experience is that the frontend functional users could setup the strings for the developers to mirror in the back end (or by an automated process if done right).

 

Hope this was helpful in giving you a brief overview of requisitions and approvers.

How AI in ERP will create the finance team of the future

Having the right enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology has heavy influence on a finance team’s ability to focus on the strategic instead of the tactical aspects of a firm. Accounting and financial activities are critical to determine business growth. Unfortunately, as digital innovations are progressing in most departments, finance doesn’t have the first priority with new changes. With the move to the cloud, ERP systems found new ways to embed artificial intelligence (AI) for better productivity. This partnership opens the doors for better financial set up as well. Bill Wardwell shared an article on Accounting Today on how AI integrated ERP systems will benefit finance teams greatly in the coming years.

Automate manual tasks
“Machine learning-driven automation results in cost reduction, increased staff productivity and overall operational efficiency gains. Because they’re spending less time re-keying information or pushing paper around the organization, team members will have more time to spend collaborating with one another, solving problems they were previously too busy for, and further optimizing the finance function.”

Deliver richer, more actionable insights
“Machine learning makes it possible to analyze massive amounts of clean data and detect patterns and other relationships to make predictions — even from potentially disparate sources — with incredible speed and accuracy. Machine learning embedded in the ERP system can examine historical data from multiple internal finance functions and external sources such as bank accounts to help an organization more accurately predict cash flow.”

Improve the experience for end users and external business partners
Natural language processing, which powers digital assistants like Siri and Alexa, is another technology that can make ERP system interactions more human and intuitive. Natural language processing can help users more easily search and interact with massive amounts of data that may be stored across applications or other silos, with a simple voice-based search. This technology could also be applied to analyze conversations between trading partners and work in conjunction with AI to suggest the next steps after a conversation has concluded.


While we are at a rich time in technologial advancement, AI and machine learning is still in their early stages when it comes to impacting financial and business management tools, including ERP. Wardwell concludes that it is no question that there is no question these technologies will ultimately transform work for the masses the same way they have transformed our consumer lives.

 

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