Infor ERP XA gets new features for mixed mode manufacturers

The system, which is aimed at companies running mixed-mode production, runs on IBM System i machines, and Kevin Piotrowski, director of discrete industry and product marketing at Infor, says it’s been designed to help streamline manufacturing processes, such as master production scheduling, inventory management, order processing, material requirements planning, detailed lot tracking, and production reporting.# “With the latest version of XA, the system functions faster and is easier to service, lowering the total cost of ownership for companies in the discrete manufacturing industry,” he says Piotrowski. Much of that improvement has been achieved by using the IBM query engine SQE, which increases the system’s speed of data retrieval and generally improves performance. Piotrowski says the enhanced version also automatically updates financials by type: accounts receivable, accounts payable, general ledger and cash, saving time by eliminating the step required to look up the transaction category. On the operational side, he adds that manufacturers are now able to receive inventory using ASN (abstract syntax notation) in addition to purchase order, which simplifies supplier transactions. Also, the system enables global manufacturers to consider inventories from all operations as part of the production process, to improve overall visibility. In fact, Piotrowski says that XA now tracks inventory in transit and records it as an asset to help companies’ accounting departments. Previously, systems maintained only the assets that were currently on hand, disregarding the goods being shipped from one location to another.