The Top 3 Benefits of Using AI-Enabled ERP Systems

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have becom a staple to modern business models today. The digital revolution has given it an even greater boost in capability and necessity. What’s next for ERP? Two words: artificial intelligence (AI). The need for AI-enabled ERP systems stems from the many advantages in automation and decision-making from modern AI systems. AI can be used with ERP as an tension to the system’s applications. Prangya Pandab shares an article on EnterpriseTalk.com highlighting the top 3 benefits of using AI-enabled ERP systems for your business. According to Pandab, using AI-enabled ERP systems has various advantages, all of which stem from the following three characteristics:

Reduced Data Entry. “Businesses can automate almost any interaction that involves manual data entry with the implementation of AI-enabled ERP, enabling employees to focus on activities that have a greater impact on the company. These AI-enabled ERP systems can decipher data from various sources, such as online invoices and order types, using natural language processing (NLP), without requiring employees to type in data from various sources. This also reduces the risk of incorrect entries.”

Intelligent Data Processing. “ERP systems are ‘intelligent to a degree and can perform small calculations. AI-enabled ERP systems can use data from one module to make a decision in another module autonomously. This means that humans aren’t required to perform repetitive calculations or make repeated references to various ERP modules.“

Data Analytics. “While most ERP can only produce reports based on historical data, AI-enabled ERP can conduct predictive analytics to improve the certainty of decision-making processes on both an operational and strategic level. This greatly improves business agility and allows them to solve problems based on reliable data.”

 

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Alva Industries Chooses Infor CloudSuite Aerospace & Defense

Alva Industries has chosen Infor CloudSuite Aerospace & Defense as its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system running on AWS, and will be implemented by consulting partner Midport Scandinavia. Since 2016, Alva Industries has established itself a visionary Norwegian company that develops electric motors and generators for electric propulsion applications. They also produce motors for the industrial drone market. Per the press release, Midport Scandinavia uses Infor’s implementation methodology where process owners at Alva Industries, together with Infor and Midport, go through the processes that end up with a fit/gap analysis. This means that the solution can largely be activated at an early stage in the process. Tommy Andersen, chief financial officer at Alva Industries, says of the collaboration, ” Both in the defense industry and aviation, there are strict and absolute requirements for subcontractors, and it is a clear advantage that Infor can deliver a cloud solution that satisfies these requirements.”

 

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Moving to CloudSuite Financials? How will you archive your Lawson data?

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It’s official, you have finalized the project to move to Cloudsuite and are ready to begin your journey to the cloud. But wait! What will you do with all your Lawson legacy data? By now you probably know that you can’t take it all with you to the cloud without a massive undertaking. Even then, your data retention policies may not allow you to turn off your Lawson 10x (or 9.0.1) servers just yet. Looks like you have more work to do.

Keeping those servers around for another 7 years is not an option. You’re likely running several Windows 2012 servers, or worst yet, Windows 2008, AIX or AS400 iSeries. Not to mention the database servers, file servers, co-location, Disaster Recovery servers and more. It’s enough to keep the most seasoned IT manager awake at night. What if the hardware fails? What if the old OS has a vulnerability we can’t patch? What if our server admin who knows how to maintain Lawson leaves? All these what-ifs are just the tip of the data retention iceberg.
One option is to park the data in a data lake and bury it under a rug for the time being. But unless your users are data analysts with some sophisticated BI tools and skills, then the data lake might as well be a Crater laker.
What if there was a way to completely remove the Lawson footprint from your data center but still provide fast, secure, and intuitive access to all the data to your users in a way that didn’t require any servers or maintenance? The APIX Serverless Framework is just that solution. Based on the AWS serverless stack, APIX has opened up incredible possibilities for inquiry only applications never before possible without a substantial investment in infrastructure. Clients can now provision a web based, lightweight, data archive solution and migrate all their data within days rather than months and at a fraction of the cost of the other solutions with none of the risk. Find out how the APIX serverless framework can help you meet all your Lawson data archive needs and eliminate the legacy servers for good.

BSI Tax Factory 11 SAAS Update and what you need to know

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At some point this month (May 2021) BSI turned off their cloud version of TF10 in favor of their TF11 offering. Even though notifications were sent out to customers in advance, many clients did not make the move in time and were therefore left with an non-functional payroll system when their Lawson payroll could not connect with TF10. Fortunately this only affected the cloud customers. Unfortunately, BSI does not offer an extension of the TF10 product for their SAAS customers and therefore the only option is to move to version 11. The catch is if the client did not have a full backup of their TF10 environment, they may be out of luck with figuring out any custom payments, calculations or tax codes. This was the case with a few of the clients we worked with this week to get them back on track. If you’re dealing with this very issue, keep reading because although there is no easy fix, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Here are the steps we recommend you follow

  • Contact BSI to let them know you’re dealing with this issue and make sure they are aware of the problem.
  • Update your local Lawson environment to the minimum requirements for BSI TF11. There is a specific patch for BSI TF11 that varies depending on your environment version (JT-1219557). This will require down time.
  • Update your local Lawson application to the minimum requirements for BSI TF11 (JT-1179406). This will likely require a database reorg.
  • Download the TFDSFILE.exe utility from your BSI portal
  • Use the executable to generate a new TF11 xml file
  • Add the following environment variables TF11_DATASET and TF11_DATABASE
  • Download the new server side drivers for the new TF11 version that corresponds to you cloud instance
  • Change the message maintenance for PRTF to reflect the new version
  • Recompile PRTF and test
  • Setup the default mappings within your BSI version
  • If you’re using custom calcs, codes, and payments you will need to set those up again unless you have a backup of them. There are ways you can discover what they may have been but that can take additional resources and time.
The above steps should get you operational but make sure to test thoroughly before running your next payroll or you will have a hard time later making corrections. As always, if you need help with any of the above steps, feel free to reach out to us via the contact us link on our site.

French Clothing Manufacturer Lemahieu Chooses Infor for Growth

French clothing and underwear designer and manufacturer Lemahieu has chosen Infor’s multi-tenant cloud ERP solution Infor CloudSuite Fashion for implementation. Founded in 1947, Lemahieu was established as a family business with a strong local identity. With its know-how and its responsible brand image, the company has embraced each of the successive revolutions linked to technological innovations, particularly in IT. Per the press release, since the 2019 takeover Martin Breuvart and Loïc Baert, Lemahieu has experienced significant growth, and is engaged in a project to restructure its production processes based on the Infor CloudSuite Fashion solution. Restructuring is necessary for the fashion brand as Lemahieu wishes to better respond to the dynamics of the market and to the requirements of quality and social and environmental responsibility. This is an ambitious project for Infor as the tech giant must demonstrate the ability of an enterprise solution to meet the demanding requirements of a company whose relatively modest size contains an abundance of business processes as numerous as they are complex.

 

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Create an Endpoint in Lawson

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Endpoints allow for external web servers to host Lawson Portal and authenticate against the chose authentication method for the main LSF application.

 

To create an endpoint,

 

Log into ssoconfig -c

Choose option “Manage SSO Domains” > “Add new SSO Domain”

Name the domain INTERNAL

Select the primary service that you will be using for authentication (might be SSOP or your thick client service)

Give the domain a meaningful description

Go back to the main menu and select “Manage Lawson HTTP Endpoints” > “Add new HTTP Endpoint”

Enter the fully qualified domain name for your endpoint

Enter the HTTP port (if you are using SSL, enter -1)

Enter the HTTPS port (if you are not using SSL, enter -1)

Enter the domain you created above

 

Select “Assign HTTP Endpoint to Service”

Assign the endpoint to the chosen authentication service

Enter the ports used to create the endpoint

Enter the name of the authentication service this endpoint should use for authentication (usually SSOP or your thick client service)

Repeat these steps to assign the endpoint to the IOS service, BPM service, and LSADMIN service.

 

Go back to the main menu.
Go to “Manage Lawson HTTP Endpoint Groups” > “Add new HTTP Endpoint Group”

Add a group for your external service with a meaningful name

Go back to “Manage Lawson HTTP Endpoint Groups” > “Add HTTP Endpoint to Group”

Enter the group name you just created above

Enter the endpoint name

Enter the points that were configured for the endpoint

Restart Lawson

Important step!!  The endpoint values are stored in the security cache, so a full recycle is required.

Smoke test

Go to https://server.domain.com/ssoconfig/SSOCfgInfoServlet

The loginurl and httpurl should match your endpoint URL.  If they don’t, you’ll need to unassign and delete the endpoint, then try adding it again.

 

Healthcare technology trends that have made our lives easier

The more healthcare develops the more it benefits the quality of patient care, services offered, efficiency, and overall making our lives easier. Although we may been skeptical at first with the technological advancements of healthcare, it turns out all we needed was a global pandemic to more or less embrace the developments in healthcare to its fullest. Lifestyle writer Vuyolwethu Fundam shares on Independent Online (IOL), one of South Africa’s leading news and information websites, some of the healthcare technology trends that have made it simpler for us to monitor our health, pandemic or not.

Telehealth – “Video conferencing, streaming media, and phone calls among other forms of virtual consultation is convenient because it can be done in the comfort of one’s own home.”

Mobile apps to keep track of health – “Mobile health tracking apps help us stay updated about our health. They vary from mental wellbeing, diagnostic tools, maternal care, medical calculators, and more.”

Wearable tech – “Wearable tech is no longer limited to just smart watches. Other advancements include iTBra (a smart wearable bra insert that can detect early breast cancer signs), MUSE (a brand sensing headband that helps you refocus during the day and recover at night while it plays relaxing meditation music), and Uptight Pro (a monitor that sticks to your back and tracks your spine’s movements, intended to correct your posture and fight back pain).

Digitization of healthcare records – “The digitization of healthcare records decreases the risks of over medication, under medication, or missing diagnoses.”

 

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Atena Corporation Builds Business Platform with Infor on AWS

Infor Japan KK, a subsidiary of Infor, and Atena Corporation, Japan’s leading provider of direct marketing and outsourcing services, recently announced the go-live of Infor Warehouse Management System (WMS), implemented on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment. Atena’s expansion plan for their logistics services to operate across Japan called for a partnership that would handle scalability and logistics transactions that may fluctuate greatly between busy and slow seasons. Per the press release, Atena chose to replace its legacy system with Infor WMS, to support its focus business areas in D2C (direct-to-consumer) and 3PL in specific fields. Infor WMS is built on the AWS cloud environment to reduce operational and maintenance costs. Additionally, digitization through Infor WMS has enabled standardization across the company’s logistics operation, which improves processing performance, reduced operation and maintenance costs through migration to the cloud, and reduced labor costs and total cost of ownership (TCO). Going forward, Atena plans to continuously expand its initiatives to promote DX by using Infor WMS. The Infor solution is fully operational in Atena’s distribution centers across Japan.

 

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Selecting the right IT partner to help you with your Merger or acquisition

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You want to work with an IT partner that has functional knowledge in addition to the technological ability to extract and re-map the data.  This allows a true partnership that looks at the process from a high level and keeps an eye on the details at the same time.

You need to look for a partner that has experience extracting data from Lawson and mapping to the format needed to upload set up and transactional data to any system and taking extracted data from another system and formatting it into what Lawson needs and uploading the data.  A partner who uses a repeatable process that allows for tweaking the process if needed through testing cycles and then having the final version ready when you are ready to go-live.

When considering a Merger or acquisition there are many considerations. Some of these are:

  • Will there be a one-time conversion and at the end everyone will be using the same system?
  • Or will there be an on-going interface between the systems for GL data only or other systems as well?
  • Do you need a full training plan?
  • How will the users be trained on the new system or processes?
  • Make sure to start with a BRD – Business Requirement Document – so you have a road map of what is expected throughout the process.  This helps both you and your partner know what is expected from both parties.

With the right partner, you can have a smooth and successful transition.

View Hotels Revolutionises Operations with Infor

Infor recently announced that View Hotels had deployed Infor Hospitality Management Solution (HMS) and Interfaces across its three Australian Hotels. This deployment was done in hopes to better leverage the cloud for data insights, marketing and remote working. Per the press release, View Hotels has already seen tremendous success in just a few months using Infor’s cloud platform, generating valuable customer insights leading to increased revenue. Owners Mimi Wong and Neil Wong of the hotel chain selected Infor for the project as a means to change the hotel’s culture and productivity. Neil says of the decision to choose the tech giant, “We needed a reliable partner that can deliver a central platform that communicates with every department. Every person who uses the system must be able to access the information and use the built-in tools to do his or her job. Implementation and training went ahead virtually, and we clearly see the benefits of Infor.”

 

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