Wholesale and Distribution

Distributors must continually seek new sources of revenue to reinforce and grow their value. Maintaining profitability in an increasingly global market requires the agility to respond quickly to new opportunities and the operational control to keep the extended supply chain focused on the bottom line.

For distribution and wholesale organizations looking to balance customer demand, complementary product lines, and profitability, Infor ERP’s wholesale and distribution solutions enable fully integrated, robust, scalable operations for maintaining a competitive edge within a dynamic extended environment. Our domain expertise combined with industry-leading technologies-for demand planning, transportation management, supply chain design, and other critical capabilities-empower distribution companies to master industry-specific issues critical to business performance.

Infor ERP’s wholesale and distribution solutions help companies like yours:

• Expand into new customer segments
• Achieve and maintain higher service levels
• Lower costs of goods sold for higher operational margins
• Minimize inventories and reduce redundancies
• Increase collaboration with customers and suppliers
• Increase responsiveness and speed to market

Ideal for distribution and wholesale organizations looking to manage extended supply chains, Infor ERP’s wholesale and distribution solutions provide broad coverage of the following core business processes: plan, source, buy, make/assemble, ship, sell, and service. You’ll develop corporate financial and merchandise plans based on anticipated demand for goods or anticipated account sales volume, make optimal sourcing/supplier decisions, streamline purchasing and contract management, add value with kitting and assembly, optimize shipping decisions and execution, and improve sales and service functions. Whether you’re a large distribution company operating within multiple divisions and geographies or a smaller, growing distributor looking to gain a competitive edge, Infor offers deep domain expertise and a 20-year track record of serving your industry.

Manufacturing

Global competition and pricing pressures place an extraordinary demand on today’s manufacturers to strive for new levels of efficiency, innovation, and competitiveness. Having the manufacturing intelligence and control to respond appropriately to a volatile market, along with the operational agility to anticipate what will be demanded in six months or a year, can mean the difference between struggling to survive-or setting the pace.

For order-driven manufacturers looking to balance customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and profitability, Infor delivers the critical ERP tools required to implement a lean manufacturing system and thrive in a lean world. These include sales planning, quotation and order processing, configuration and variant management, production planning and control, sub-contract management, inventory and purchasing management, environmental regulatory compliance tools, and costing and value flow management. You’ll streamline end-to-end processes by creating reliable projections and integrating this information into your operations and those of your suppliers.

Read more…

Financials

Manufacturing organizations must standardize on a single, integrated modern financial ERP solution in order to compete globally. Whether they operate a single site or multiple sites, it’s the only way they can accommodate single-country and multi-country accounting practices, taxation systems, and compliance demands and differentiate themselves from the competition.

For manufacturers, Infor delivers a robust, multi-platform, multi-language enterprise resource planning systems that fully integrates financial management with operations management, providing support for detailed product, manufacturing, and project costing methods; national and supra-national statutory bookkeeping and GAAP regulations; and various payment/collection methods and taxes that conform to local and national business practices. Flexible, sophisticated security and internal controls that help organizations meet critical new compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and IFRS are also part of the package.

Infor’s ERP financial solutions help companies like yours:

• Support local statutory bookkeeping in over 30 countries from one system
• Reduce the cost of financial transaction support via optimized, streamlined financial processes and role-based workbenches
• Meet critical compliance regulations with sophisticated audit trails that drill down to report on base operational transactions
• Support integration of transactions from multiple financial and logistics sites
• Generate sales invoices from disparate sources
• Manage multi-source valuations in different asset books

Infor has over 20 years of experience providing ERP and financial solutions to global manufacturing companies including Boeing, Tyco, and Carrier.

Infor enterprise resource planning systems incorporate financials that boost your competitive advantage by streamlining financial processes and reducing costs, increasing accuracy of financial data, providing better oversight of expenses and cash flow, improving credit and collections management, and enabling tighter control over project and cost accounting. By addressing the full range of multinational requirements-including fiscal and local compliance issues and integration with other domains in your ERP system-and helping you improve performance management, you get all the critical components you need to manage complexity and extend your global reach.

Quality Management

In today’s global market, quality is king as manufacturers face increased competition for customers. The pressure to reduce time and error makes it imperative that companies establish and maintain quality assurance criteria that fully support industry regulations. To remain competitive, manufacturers need to optimize their engineering and product lifecycles-and leverage supply chains-to bring superior products to market on time and on budget.

For order-driven manufacturers looking to balance productivity, quality assurance, customer satisfaction, and profitability, Infor delivers a solution for fully integrated, robust, scalable automated quality management designed to fit their specific industry requirements. Our solution integrates all logistic and quality management processes, enabling manufacturers to improve operational performance and leverage their supply chains to attain superior quality-and exceed customer expectations.

Infor ERP’s quality management solutions help companies like yours:

• Manage quality across multiple plants and distributed teams
• Improve decision-making with real-time, accurate engineering and product data
• Monitor supplier performance against industry benchmarks
• Increase customer satisfaction with shorter response times
• Establish and manage criteria to support industry standards and regulations
• Improve collaboration between employees, suppliers, and customers
• Reduce the cost of goods sold

Ideal for makers of complex products, the quality management components of Infor ERP help companies improve quality levels and take corrective action when necessary. They allow you to streamline business processes by automating associated concept, design, pre-production, production, and post-production activities, and by facilitating the collection, analysis, and control of key data. You’ll get support for cost-effective decision-making with pre-production process analyses, including performance and capability indices. You’ll also improve response times; increase customer satisfaction by maintaining accessible, detailed customer histories; and monitor and manage communications with customers and suppliers to improve all supply chain relationships. And through better process management, you’ll prevent and reduce failure-increasing your profit margins.

Process Manufacturing

Balancing  reductions in total cost of quality, compliance and to service without impact quality or the ability to capitalizing on new opportunities have always been a focus of  process manufacturers. This is more complicated by the increasing power of mega retailers or customer, consumers migration to new channels, changing demographics, shorten product lifecycles . – and a host of other challenges.

For chemical, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, and other process manufacturers looking to manage this balancing act, Infor delivers a set of proven value optimization capabilities that can increase revenue, boost profits, improve quality, and ensure compliance. Based on a configurable infrastructure and backed by domain experts who understand the process industry, our solutions allow you to react to changing conditions with the best sourcing options and most profitable product mix. Read more…

Lean Manufacturing

Adopting a holistic lean philosophy across the entire enterprise is a path rather than a destination. It requires continual monitoring and incremental improvements to the productivity of the process, the quality of the product, and the overall satisfaction of the customer. The concept of lean goes beyond the factory floor and encompasses the processes of suppliers, customers, logistics providers, and other partners.

For manufacturers looking to balance inventory levels and global supply chains with improved performance, quality, and customer satisfaction, Infor’s flexible, scalable lean manufacturing solution helps enable lean processes throughout the entire enterprise-including the internal and external value chain and the front and back office. Rely on us for deep lean manufacturing expertise-from implementation to support, professional services, and training. Read more…

Service Management with Infor Erp

Power and control for customer-centric service and maintenance.

Increased competition and the imperative to retain customers by offering new products and services mean that aftermarket service has become an area of focus for many manufacturers. They recognize the need to be more proactive in tracking and managing equipment performance and to increase resource utilization and responsiveness in order to satisfy customer requirements and ensure equipment uptime. Read more…

ALE and SAP R/3 (4)

R/3-to-R/3 InterfaceS

Now let’s talk about how to build interfaces between two or more R/3 systems. While the underlying concepts are almost the same for either R/3-to-R/3 or R/3-to-external system interfaces, there are important differences in configurations and in the mode of communications. We will work with an example of distributing characteristics and classes from one R/3 instance to another. While using objects such as Materials, Customers, and Vendors, it is often necessary to classify these objects to further describe their nature and to distinguish them from other objects. In SAP, we use characteristics and classes to classify objects. Characteristics are attributes that further describe an object. For example, a chemical’s temperature sensitivity and a customer’s store shelf square-footage are characteristics of objects that can be maintained in the R/3 classification system. Classes are groups of characteristics that conform to a class type — such as Material or Vendor. While the term classification data refers to the actual values of the characteristics, classes and characteristics can be considered configuration data. In SAP, it is not possible to transport class and characteristic data using the Correction and Transport System (CTS) across systems (such as development, QA, or production). ALE provides message types, IDOC types, and function modules to distribute class, characteristic, and classification data to other systems. Let’s walk through the process of building an interface to distribute characteristics and classes from one R/3 instance to another. Read more…

ALE and SAP R/3 (3)

Sample ALE scenarios

Now let’s explore a couple of sample ALE scenarios. The first illustrates a few interfaces with an external warehouse management system using ALE technology. The second depicts the distribution of master data between two or more R/3 systems. These scenarios are a small sample of the multitude of possible ALE interfaces.

Example 1: Consider a business scenario in which R/3 needs to be interfaced with an external warehouse management system (WMS) (see Figure 3). This scenario assumes that the Inventory Management module is being implemented. In an outbound interface, the SAP application communicates to the WMS picking requests — Materials in the warehouse that need to be picked for packing and shipping. Message type PICKSD, whose corresponding IDOC type is SDPIOD01, is used. This IDOC consists of a header with fields for delivery number, shipping point, total weight of delivery, units of measurement, and the name and address of the ship-to party. The header is followed by one or more detail segments that contain the delivery items with fields for item number, Material number, quantity, and units of measure. Read more…

Sap System Tables

Sales and Distribution Tables

Materials Management Tables Read more…