What are Paint Screens? When do I use them?

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Every now and then the system hiccups. Just like we all do.  When this happens, sometimes there are ways of addressing the issue and sometimes there are not through the standard forms.

When there isn’t a way to address the issue with the standard processes, Paint Screens can be used to go behind the scenes and address the issue that is needing to be fixed. So of course, they should be used sparingly and only when there is no other choice to address the issue.

Some examples of this are:

  • PO lines where the quantities indicate that the line should be closed, however the line is still open.  This keeps the PO header open as well.
  • AP Credit memos that were canceled yet still show up on the MA126 report.

Are you thinking about integrating an external project system to your ERP?

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There are several things that you need to take into consideration:

  1. What are the accounting needs?
  2. When do the commitments need to be booked in the GL?
  3. Budgets:
    • Do you want a budget to be tracked in your external Project tracking system?
    • Do you want a total not to exceed budget in your ERP to make sure someone is notified when the budget is exceeded?
    • Do you want a detailed budget in both places?
  4. If there is retention from supplier invoices to be paid at the end of the project, when does the retention need to be booked?
  5. Where is the project initially setup? In the external project tracking system or the ERP?
  6. What are the touch points that need to be considered when determining what the interface points are?
  7. How will your ERP know when the project is complete so it can be marked as closed?

How to maximize your ERP investment

Implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system can be beneficial to your business operations. However, if you don’t fully understand its benefits, you will never reap the rewards of your new system, or worse, create problems. With many ERP options available be sure to invest in the ERP system that best aligns with your business needs. IT Web outlines a few ways to maximize your ERP investment.

  • Map your system to your processes and strategic objectives – Consider aligning yourself with an ERP service that understands the scope of your business and its processes, ideally mapping your desired (not necessarily current) business processes with its assistance, placing the organisation in a solid position to help you develop a tailored but still supportable ERP solution that is mapped to your specific business requirements.
  • Beyond basic functionality – Getting true value from your ERP is about much more than simply enabling more efficient processes and generating transactional data. At the end of the day, the data that the system produces is the competitive advantage your business needs to grow.
  • Plan for growth – It’s important that your ERP system is able to grow alongside your company, and an effective ERP partner should be able to help you optimise and innovate across your business.
  • Keep employees up to date – Because the system will be evolving constantly to meet changing business needs, employees’ knowledge of how to operate the system will also need to be updated continuously.

The ERP system you choose can offer a massive return on investment, but only if you have a clear roadmap as to how you should implement and leverage your system appropriately.

 

For Full Article, Click Here

Lawson Portal – Getting Started as a New User

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When first using Lawson portal, it can be a bit overwhelming with all the buttons and unfamiliar UI. The first change I always make is changing the buttons to display text instead of icons.

 

First go to Preferences >> User Options

 

Under “Toolbar Button Display” select Text >> Apply and OK

Once you’ve applied the changes, your icons will change from this:

To this:

This is especially helpful for users with higher tier access as you don’t want to accidentally click delete or change a form when you didn’t mean to!

 

Hope this simple tip was helpful!

APP Group, Mackage and SOIA & KYIO Select Infor for its Digital Supply Chain Transformation

Infor recently announced that APP Group, major luxury outerwear retail giant, has selected Infor Retail CloudSuite to support their exponential growth and global expansion. APP Group manages two global leading brands, Mackage and SOIA & KYO, and will implement Infor CloudSuite Fashion Suite, Infor Demand Planner, Infor Nexus, and Birst analytics to aid in accelerating its direct-to-consumer expansion. APP Group will modernize and consolidate their multiple ERPs with CloudSuite Fashion and leverage the modern, connected platform via Infor Nexus to support growth across their various direct to consumer channels, wholesale, store growth and eCommerce. Donna Lisk, Chief Financial Officer at APP Group, comments that as their business is rapidly expanding, their need for a modernized IT foundation will be invested in Infor’s ERP and supply chaing solutions. This partnership, Lisk hopes, will “help provide the transformation our organization needs to drive agility, improve our time to market for new products and expand globally.”

 

For Full Article, Click Here

Lawson Portal Helpful User Guide

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Over the years I’ve assisted users debug issues in Lawson portal.  Through this time, I’ve noticed a pattern of users not utilizing fundamental functions of portal.  I’ll share to you a few of them today.

 

New Tab Button:

Instead of using up more of your PC’s memory, Lawson has its own tab system that users often miss. This will let you switch between multiple forms faster and easier as shown below:

 

Search box keywords:

 You might be used to typing in form numbers as shown below, but did you know you can type in keywords as well?

Don’t know a form name to General Ledger? Type in the word General Ledger and click search:

This is great for newer and veteran users taking on newer tasks.

 

Form Help:

Finally, if you want to get more information about the form you’re currently using. Go to the form and click Help >> Form Help.

 

Hope these tips helped you in your journey in mastering Lawson Portal.

How To Delegate Complex Tasks To Your Team

Learning to delegate is an essential skill for any situation, personal or professional. In business, delegation is essential for building repeatable processes and systems. However, no matter how good of a process you create at your workplace, the unknowns like employees calling in sick or having a massive layoff calls for reorganization and restructuring. Maddy Osman at Trello states that it is necessary to proactively document and share knowledge so that other team members can step in to take over when something needs to be done. She shares a framework to break down complex work and effectively delegate tasks to a team:

  1. Create A Knowledge Base For Sharing Process Information
  2. Provide A Walkthrough For Each Process To Delegate
  3. Anticipate FAQs & Possibilities For User Error
  4. Create A 1-Page PDF Onboarding Guide To Bring New Teammates Up To Speed
  5. Explicitly Encourage Questions From Teammates
  6. Use A Project Management Tool To Set Expectations & Create Accountability

It’s not easy to break tasks down into repeatable processes. Other members of your team may approach problems completely different than you would, which is why you have to anticipate where a process can break down and any questions people might have when executing a task. However, if you take the necessary steps and invest in time to create a comprehensive and useful process documentation, you can save yourself time and resources in the future.

 

Original post by Maddy Osman from Trello.

For Full Article, Click Here

Infor Releases New Solution Designed to Transform Price Management for Retailers

Infor’s newest cloud-native price management solution, Infor Price Management (IPM) has been officially released. The newest addition to the Infor Retail sector, Infor Price Management (IPM) is scalable, self-serviceable, and configurable, and serves as “one version of the truth” for price: evaluating prices, identifying conflicts and preventing leakage across applicable selling channels.  It enables retailers to focus on the creation of proprietary pricing models, identifying relevant sources of market intelligence, and differentiating their position in the market through value-based pricing. In addition, Infor Price Management permits retailers to bring together prices from disparate sources into a single execution platform for transparency across the organization – with the goal of eliminating conflicts and reducing price leakage.

 

For Full Article, Click Here

How to set ESS access from an external domain and for custom forms

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Step 1: Login to Infor Security Services (ISS)

Step 2: Goto SSO >> Manage Domains and click edit button as shown:

We are simply verifying the names of the displayed XML files:

Step 3: On the LSF server, go to the %LAWDIR%\security\domainauth\EXTERNAL directory to edit that XML

 

Step 4: Add an entry to an existing tree or create a new one:

 

 

That’s all that’s to it.