15 December, 2020

As 2020 wraps up, we wanted to share some year-end best practices for closing out your Fourth Shift ERP. This has been an exciting and productive year in manufacturing!

The below checklist will guide you through items that will help get your business set up to hit the ground running in 2021!

Fourth Shift ERP:
Lot Trace:

— Review Retest and Expiration dates for lot numbers and move them to corresponding location

— Purge Lot Trace history as needed, keeping in mind compliance and retention requirements: LHIP (Perform Fourth Shift Backup prior to any purge)

Purchasing:

— Review and update Vendor contracts, quotes (prices) and Out Effectivity dates

— Review Vendor activity and update status to Phased out or Inactive if needed

— Close out and re-issue blanket purchase orders as required

Manufacturing:

— Update shop calendar for 2021

— Prepare and load next year’s Master Production Schedule; update planning parameters according to it

— Prepare/apply Cycle counting

— Delete empty order headers

— Clear Backflush report

— Purge item old history as needed, keeping in mind compliance and retention requirements: AUDP (Perform Fourth Shift Backup prior to any purge)

Shipping:

— Purge old history: SREV (Perform Fourth Shift Backup prior to any purge)

Costs:

— Review, simulate, and update costs, schedule year end cost roll as per your processes (Perform Fourth Shift Backup prior to exchanging to standard cost)

Financial:

— Enter next year’s calendar, including GL Periods and Starting & Ending Dates

— Review/update/add Recurring Journal Entries

— Review and clear the following reports: APUV, APTB (small balances), and ARTB (small balances)

— Purge old history: APPG, ARPG, CSPG, GLHP (Perform Fourth Shift Backup prior to any purge)

System Admin Tasks for ERP Systems:
— Purge Statistics: VPFR, POYE, and COYE executions to clear Vendors and Customers statistics (Perform Fourth Shift Backup prior to any purge)

— Update Number Sequence:

— OACF for purchase orders, customer orders, and manufacturing orders

— Review sequence numbers for AP checks and update if needed

— Typically, AR invoices/AR credit memos/journal entries/cash sets/manual shipments sequence numbers don’t need to be updated, but a review can be suggested

— Review recurring invoices review and update if needed

— SQL Backups: Archive Year End Backups (after closing) of all databases for retention and audit purposes

— Archive Year End reports

— Review Older Archives in place (ARCHMOD) and purge old year’s files (review retention)