5 Lesser-Known Ways Cloud ERP Helps You Save Operational Costs

Your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is the vehicle that integrates all your business processes across your organization. When CIOs first selected their ERP platforms, t hey saw immediate impact. But that implementation happened many decades ago, and ERP has since evolved. More specifically, cloud-based ERPs look like the way to go. Moving your on-premise ERP systems to the cloud not only makes it more accessible and secure, but it can be a cost-saving solution if you plan it out well. IT Specialist and SAP expert Brad Rudisail shares an informative article on Spiceworks.com of several ways having  a Cloud-based ERP can not only help your business run smoother, but can also cut operational costs significantly.

  1. Best Cost-Saving Practices. “Best practice translates into best cost efficiency. If you maintain your automobile according to the manufacturer’s best practices, you can, on average, extend the car’s life, save money through optimal fuel efficiency, and enjoy better driving performance. It is no different with your business because following best practices means business tasks and operations are accomplished more efficiently using fewer resources. It also provides other benefits that lead to added cost savings. A cloud ERP solution, such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, can ensure that your organization has the ready-to-go, preconfigured processes it needs to better perform on day one.”
  2. Energy and Space Savings. “Companies are increasingly adopting sustainability and green initiatives driven by ethical, economic, regulatory, and reputational motivations. Opting for a cloud ERP solution not only negates the need for hefty hardware investments and their upkeep but also eliminates cooling requirements. This shift can lead to significant reductions in energy costs. The space previously used for servers can be reallocated for other revenue-generating activities or reduced.”
  3. Grow Without Limits. “A cloud ERP solution provides the scalability that businesses need to quickly adapt to acquisitions, reorganizations, and new business unit creation with flexible organizational structures and reports that can analyze the company across any dimension. When implementing a cloud-based ERP solution, savings are realized from the very beginning as the ramp-up for a cloud ERP system is much faster than on-prem deployment. Additionally, Cloud ERP continually introduces new capabilities that support business best practices without incurring additional costs or undergoing complex upgrade processes. This gives companies the chance to leverage innovation as soon as it is introduced. Cloud ERP fosters both scalability and innovative growth.”
  4. Enhanced Collaboration and Mobility. “In a hybrid workforce, your location managers, mobile sales teams and remote workers need to be able to access necessary information without needing to be at the company’s primary location, reducing travel and associated costs. Mobile capabilities are built into SaaS ERP products rather than added on as an afterthought. Cloud ERP systems also allow for real-time data updates. This means that when one department makes changes or updates data, other departments can immediately see and act upon those changes, ensuring everyone is working from the most current information. Whether accessing Cloud ERP from a desktop in the corporate office or a mobile device at home or on the road, users encounter the same unified experience thanks to the same universal interface.”
  5. No Effort Patching. “It has become a constant mantra among IT departments — keep your systems fully patched with the latest updates. While patching certainly helps with cybersecurity and system performance, it is also a mundane, costly process for the IT department. By removing patching and updating from their plate, you could instantly free up considerable time and expense for them. With automated patching in cloud ERP systems, security updates are applied as soon as they’re available. This swift action extends to zero-day vulnerabilities, which are prime targets for hackers. Given today’s heightened emphasis on security, cloud ERP emerges as a decidedly more secure option.”

 

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Using tokendef to add a user menu

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tokendef: Using tokendef to add a user menu with a couple of different forms as menu options in Portal.

 

Trying to use ‘tokendef’ to add a user menu with a couple different forms as menu options, specifically for AP90.1 and AP90.2.  In Portal the menu launches (the menu name appears at the top), but the menu options do not display.  An XML error may also be encountered in Portal when trying this.

Resolution:

To setup this up correctly, menu names that are going to be used in Portal, must be in a XXXX.01 format, where ‘X’ is a letter or number.

 

After creating a new menu using tokendef you will need to run an IOSCacheRefresh otherwise, you will get an error stating bookmark not found in Portal when trying to access the new menu.

Revolutionize Your Industry: Archive Legacy ERP Applications

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Daudruy Van Cauwenberghe Adopts Infor’s Cloud ERP for the Food and Beverage Industry

Infor recently announced that major French oil supplier Daudruy has chosen to deploy the Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage solution, a cloud-native enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and specifically built for the food and beverage industry. The deployment will be carried out by Infor partner LTTD Consulting, a food industry expert and privileged partner from the outset of the project. Per the press release, Daudruy and its subsidiaries focus on oilseed-related businesses, offering customers vegetable and animal oils and fats, biodiesel and, more recently, biogas. The company is recognized for the quality of its products and for its strict social and environmental values. It has implemented rigorous traceability and tracking rules, addressing issues at the heart of modern business concerns. Daudruy is also recognized for its exceptional ability to offer made-to-measure products. Daudruy employs 200 people and generated €520 million in revenues in 2022. Additionally, Laurent Lebecque, ERP manager at Daudruy, points out that “Securing our business processes through validation workflows was a key element in the study of our information system transformation projects. We really wanted to improve this aspect with a solution dedicated to our business sector, while retaining the agility and precision we already have in terms of customization thanks to unique practices, controlled from end to end in terms of product quality, volumes and logistics.”

 

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Restoring existing Lawson Cloud Security Users – Unable to Authenticate Error

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When restoring an existing cloud user in Lawson security (that was previously disabled), you have to match the mingle IFS ID with the SSOP identity.

 

  1. Go to mingle >> User Management

  1. View a user and under details look for the IFS User GUID
  2. Go to your orgs Infor Security Service webpage and edit the users identity
  3. Under SSOP Identity, (delete existing one) and copy the IFS User GUID in step 2 in the user field.
  4. Type in any password in both fields and click Save

 

 

This should resolve the authentication error.

 

Here is a screenshot of the whole process (ISS on left, Mingle User Management on right):

Good luck!

How to Safely Delete Obsolete Data

While you may think purging your data may risk you tossing information that may be needed in the future, it is even more of a risk to have too much obsolete data hanging around without the proper security measures. Not only does removing obsolete data clear up space, it also helps organizations minimize both legal and compliance risks. John Edwards, business technology journalist, shares an article on InformationWeek along with other technology experts on how to safely delete your obsolete data from your organization.

Reliable Identification. “‘A reliable way to identify obsolete data is to periodically review all collected data and then draft a retention policy based on sensitivity and need. Any data that doesn’t need to be stored should be deleted promptly,’ says Mungai. Beth Fulkerson, privacy and data security partner at law firm Culhane Meadows, adds, ‘To achieve comprehensive privacy compliance, organizations should create a data map listing all of the types of personally identifiable information (PII) collected, processed, stored, or shared. A data management policy can be created in a similar manner, involving different stakeholders for different types of data and taking into consideration laws that require deletion rather than retention.”

Safer Handling. “The best way to handle obsolete data is to minimize the amount of data collected. Mungai suggests that ‘By reducing the data that’s collected to only the bare minimum, organizations significantly reduce the risk of inadvertently storing unnecessary data. This approach is effective because it’s proactive instead of reactive.’ Kurup add that organizations should plan for archiving or deleting data long before it becomes obsolete.”

Key Components. “‘Training and change management are key components of a successful data management program,’ says Edwards. Kurup adds, ‘Adjusting user behavior related to email, file storage, tagging, and sharing can streamline data management and significantly reduce the amount of obsolete data created.’ To be successful, Kurup concludes, organizations should work to improve the user experience instead of just simply establishing new policies and procedures.”

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Securing your health: The importance of data archiving

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How often should you back up your data?

When it comes to protecting your data, one of the biggest questions you’ll have is how often should you back up your data? Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear cut answer as the truth is it varies from company to company. The answer to this question for your specific organization has a follow up of sub-questions such as what your legal, financial and regulatory requirements, and how much your company can afford to lose. Stuart Burns, virtualization expert in VMware, system integration, disaster recovery and systems management, shares an article on TechTarget on how to determine when your organization should do data backups. “Most organizations use a recovery point objective (RPO) to decide backup frequency, says Burns. “RPO dictates how close to the current point in time the company’s restored data should be after data restoration.” While there might not be a single answer to the question of how often should a company perform data backups, Burns points out, there is no doubt that it must be done on a regular basis. Options such as automation, differential and incremental backups, other data back up solutions, or hiring consultants to regularly back up and maintain your data are great options for your data back up strategy.

According to Burns, “Automation is a common go-to when increasing the number of backups, because it means that the process is no longer reliant on someone being available to start a backup. Automation removes these variables from the equation, but it’s critical to actually check the backup logs manually every day to ensure the correct items are being backed up and no failure or errors have occurred.”

If you can’t back up your data every day, this is where differential and incremental backups come in. “Differential backups start by copying all changes since the previous full backup. After the first differential backup operation, these types of backups continue to copy all data changed since the last full backup,” says Burns. “Incremental backups copy the files that have changed since the last backup of any type, not just full. For example, to restore on Thursday from a full backup from the previous weekend, the administrator would have to restore from the weekend and the Wednesday evening using a differential backup. Doing the same with an incremental backup scheme would mean restoring the weekend backup and then the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday backups to get the same result.”

If you don’t have the resources or have too much on your plate for these data backup projects, the other alternatives could be to have an automated software solution that backs up and archives your data regularly. Alternatively, you could also hire a consulting firm to conduct data archival back ups every few months or however often your company decides to run backups.No matter how often or what direction you take to run data backups, the key is regular date maintenance to ensure better data management and security.

 

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The Green IT Revolution

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Lawson Portal: Requestor does not exist error when logging in to Portal and selecting the shopping link for RQC

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At times your user may get the error “Requestor does not exist” when logging into Lawson Portal and selects the Shopping link for Requisition Center.

 

This is because a valid Requestor must exist in Manage Identities in the Lawson Security Administrator (LSA) application.  To verify this, follow these steps:

1)  Login to the LSA Application

2)  Select User Management

3)  Select Manage Identities and verify the correct Requestor is populated

4)  Upon entering RQC/Shopping and the User’s Profile in Shopping where you see the user’s Requester, if it’s not showing the correct Requester, have the user click on the “New” button in the bottom-right-hand corner of the screen.

 

Note:  After any changes are made in LSA, upon re-entering RQC XML, you need to go into the Utilities link (rqc/html/utility.htm) and click on the RQC IOS Cache Refresh button before accessing the Shopping link again in RQC.