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Ask the Experts
 Does your company have IFS-related questions? Perhaps you are facing Manufacturing, Financial, or Distribution problems that are begging for a solution? Do you have a technical issue that needs to be resolved?
Here is your chance to ask IFS-related questions to our team of highly qualified experts.
Email us your questions. Our team of experts will get back to you with our best answer. If your question is featured in The Edge, we will send one of our favorite toys. |
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Consultant's Corner
| Interview with Philip Murphy
This month's Consultant Corner reports on a recent interview for The Edge with Phillip Murphy, eNSYNC's Vice President of Application and Product Development. Phillip and his staff recently released ScanWorks7 for IFS.
In this interview, Phillip discusses the Windows Mobile operating system, the new graphical user interface, and why they waited until now to make this move.
Read the full article here.
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Technical Tips & Tricks
 Get Close To Your DataIf you're reading this article it's because you have an Oracle database, and in all odds an IFS Oracle database. In its most basic description, the IFS Oracle database is comprised of two sides: data and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). The data are the details of every record and transaction in your ERP system. It is just data. Without a program to manipulate it, your data can't help you run your business. The APIs manipulate this data. They perform queries, modify records, and return results. The APIs are the only touch point for changing a record. They guarantee proper locking and data integrity. The IFS Windows client (and other servers) call the APIs to manipulate the data. For example, to place orders, generate invoices, process shop orders, or add new customers. Why is the database layered this way? Primarily because it's efficient. When you run a transaction through the database, the code and the data reside in a memory space owned by the same parent process. If we relied on the IFS client (or other servers) to change the data, locking would be inconsistent, real-time processing would be much slower, and the amount of network traffic generated much larger. This article provides brief descriptions of the layers we use every day with applications like IFS and ScanWorks. Read the full article here. |
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Greetings!
A Better ROI (Return on Information) from IFS Applications
Happy New Year from the eNSYNC team! With the Holidays behind us (we hope yours were grand!), it's back to business which most certainly entails strategies and tactics to help stem the tide of an ugly recession. Obviously, for those who work with IFS Applications or whose job it is to keep IFS working, achieving a better "Return on Information" is a key goal, since helping users do their jobs better leads to a competitive advantage. It's always been difficult to accurately quantify the ROI of ERP projects, largely because of the cross functional nature of the applications, but it is very easy to quantify the ROI of data collection systems which supply ERP systems with data. As we all know, ERP systems have a ferocious appetite for data. Satisfying this hunger with accurate and timely data is of paramount importance if your IFS based information system is to truly yield a better return on the information.
Having implemented more than 100 ERP data collection systems over the past ten years, eNSYNC finds that productivity gains from automated data collection generally fit into two categories: "Hard Savings," or easily quantifiable savings, and "Soft" or less tangible benefits.
Hard expense savings commonly come from:
- Reduced labor costs. One of eNSYNC's ScanWorks customers reported a $40,000 labor savings for each physical inventory attributed to just the cycle counting transaction.
- Reduced inventory holding costs resulting from more reliable information of what's in stock.
- Fixed asset cost reduction by better equipment tracking and control.
To learn more about "Hard" and "Soft" data collection ROI and areas for potential savings please see the linked white paper.
Given our IFS customers' focus on cost savings and productivity improvements, we are dedicating this issue of "The Edge" to automated data collection and specifically our new release of ScanWorks 7. Besides a major technology upgrade, you'll find our latest offering for IFS bar code data collection packed with many new "Work Smart" features, functions, and productivity improvement tools.
Wishing you a Productive and Prosperous New Year!
Roger Resley
President
eNSYNC Solutions, Inc.
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The Company We Keep
Year End Physical Inventory with ScanWorks
 Every year most companies go through the dreaded Year End Inventory. Often this requires shutting down all activities while everyone who can count is enlisted to walk the aisles and count and label every item in the factory. This process often takes days if not weeks to complete and is very costly to say the least. Now with ScanWorks' improved Physical Inventory transaction, "Smart Count™," what took days has been reduced to hours! Contec, Inc. discovered that Smart Count saved more than 750 man hours and gained a substantial amount of production time.
Read the full article here. |
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ScanWorks Scoreboard
Introducing ScanWorks 7™
eNSYNC Solutions announces its newest product release of the most popular and widely used bar code data collection solution for IFS Applications! ScanWorks 7 represents the next generation in bar code data collection featuring a powerful new architecture built entirely on the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET framework. Supporting all versions of IFS, the "New Look" GUI powered by Windows Mobile, is scanner hardware independent and offers a rich set of unique navigational features. ScanWorks 7 is intuitive to learn, easy to use (no stylus required), provides part field image look up from any inventory transaction, and incorporates the new "Work Smart" productivity bundles, consisting of 35 standard IFS transactions .
Read the full article here.
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