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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
| Inventory Statistics and Valuation
By Ken Burt, eNSYNC Solutions
Ever wonder what your inventory value and status was at the beginning or end of a month? Or have you been asked to provide that information to someone else on short notice? It can be a real challenge when you have a 24/7 manufacturing operation with inventory transactions occurring constantly, but IFS provides you with the tools you need to easily track both inventory quantities and values.
In this article, Ken describes the setup options, the available queries, and the functions of each. Click below to see the entire article.
Read the full article here.
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Technical Tips & Tricks
 Get a Job: Managing the Oracle Batch Queues
The Oracle Scheduler is a feature you own with your Oracle database, which has several advantages:
- It can leverage existing database knowledge.
- DBAs have total control over what runs on the database and when.
- The Scheduler is platform-independent. Therefore, jobs can be managed similarly on all platforms. Jobs can easily be moved from one system to another, for example from a development environment to production, using the EXPORT/IMPORT utility in the database.
In this article, Alan Clark discusses how this feature works, its functionality and how you can take advantage of it.
Read the full article here. |
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Greetings!
Dave's Top Ten? - Reasons ERP Projects Fail
 I doubt seriously that David Letterman would ever give these reasons air time, because they truly are not funny. ERP project failures are certainly a painful experience that over the years have raised havoc with business operations and have often been career limiting experiences for those involved in project management.
While eNSYNC Solutions is certainly well known for the number of product extensions and enhancements developed for IFS, it's perhaps a little known fact that eNSYNC is very involved in full implementations and upgrades. In fact, since 1992 we have been involved in dozens of implementations with other major ERP packages and since 2000 exclusively for IFS. Over these 17 years we have certainly learned a lot and have definitely gathered enough evidence to really understand the root cause of most ERP project debacles.
Several years back at a gathering of my project managers and most senior implementation personnel I asked them to write down for me what they believe are the top ten reasons an ERP project can go off the rails. The findings were most interesting. The rankings differed, but with more than 20 people providing input to this question, the issues were almost unanimously the same.
So if you will click on the link below I will be happy to share with you what we at eNSYNC believe to be the top ten reasons an ERP project can fail. Hopefully you will find this information of value and perhaps use it as your compass for a successful project should you be called upon to navigate a new implementation or undertake a major upgrade.
Top Ten Reasons ERP Projects Fail
Sincerely,
Roger Resley
President
eNSYNC Solutions, Inc.
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The Company We Keep
Preferred Rubber Compounding Corp.
 Preferred Rubber Compounding Corporation provides recipe-to-dock compounding and supporting services to companies using rubber, elastomers, and related specialty materials in their products. As with many industries, the cost of raw materials was fluctuating wildly on a weekly basis for Preferred Rubber. They made the tough decision to base customer order pricing on raw material cost at time of shipment, regardless of when the customer placed the order. At the beginning of each month, each customer would receive a letter describing current pricing for each of the compounds that they normally would purchase during that month.
Standard IFS functions provided most of the information, but not in a format that would tell the customers what they needed to know, so Preferred Rubber was faced with the daunting task of moving the data to MS Excel then formatting, printing, and joining these with letters explaining the price adjustments and other customer related information.
The additional labor cost was more than thirty plus hours per month, every month. The solution for this problem offered several interesting challenges.
Read the full article here.
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ScanWorks Scoreboard
GE - Aviation
GE - Aviation's Central Distribution Facility located in Jacksonville, Florida is the main spare parts inventory location for GE's military jet engines. Operating as a joint venture with AAR, the Jacksonville facility warehouses, distributes, and coordinates the maintenance on the F404 and F414 military jet engines.
 Every part is serialized or Lot controlled, requiring a great deal of accuracy to insure that the correct part is picked to fulfill an order for a specific engine. In addition, inventory is maintained for several different branches of the military that all use the GE engines, and they need to be accounted for separately. The only practical way to manage the warehouse with all the data entry and validation required was to deploy a real time bar code data collection system. GE looked to eNSYNC solutions for their in-depth knowledge of the Distribution components of IFS and their "out of the box" bar code solution for IFS
Read the full article here.
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Coming Events
Two events are coming up in the near future:
ScanWorks 7 - Next Generation of ADC Designed for IFS
 eNSYNC is pleased to announce a new product, ScanWorks 7 which offers barcode data collection incorporating Windows Mobile v5.0+ architecture. This new generation software provides a rich set of navigational features while maintaining the easy use and reliability ScanWorks is known for.
Mark your calendar for March 10 when you can view this great new product at either 10:00 am or 3:00 pm Central Daylight Time.
I would like to attend at 10:00 a.m. CDT on March 10.
I would like to attend at 3:00 p.m. CDT on March 10. | |
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