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...

15 December, 2020

This year’s Fourth Shift Summit was originally intended to take place over three days in Savannah, Georgia. Like nearly everything else this year, our plans changed and we pivoted to an all-virtual format.   We wanted to thank our participants for their flexibility in format change. We...

05 November, 2020
Your company may be using Fourth Shift® ERP, but how well is it actually working for you and your company? While your team may utilize the software on a daily basis, you might also be lacking sufficient training, maintenance, updates, and software to keep Fourth Shift® and your company running the best it can. However, the reality is, you may not realize you need additional assistance.  
28 July, 2020
Do you find yourself frustrated with trying to locate information within Fourth Shift® ERP regarding your customers, orders, invoices, balances, or shipments?  Do you find yourself getting annoyed as you attempt to reprint old invoices and credit memos? Have you become exasperated trying to narrow down qualifying information by using more than the customer ID or name only to find that you must navigate through multiple screens to locate the information you need?
08 July, 2020
On June 12, 2020, Infor released Version 8.00B of Fourth Shift® ERP, the most recent update of Fourth Shift® available to the public. Within release 8.00, Fourth Shift provided the ability to control which accounts can be used for Inventory Adjust (INVA) and Expense (G-type) Purchase Order (POMT) transactions. However, this functionality is not enabled out-of-the-box, and instead must be turned on to be active.  Once this logic is turned on, only accounts that can be used for these two transactions will be allowed.  Selecting an account that is not permitted will generate an error message and not allow the transaction to be completed.
30 June, 2020
The Gateway Work Center (WC) field in Fourth Shift is maintained on the ‘Item Master Planning Detail’ screen. However, most companies don’t know what it is used for and often leave this field blank or use the default value of ‘GATEWC’. Let’s take a quick look at why this field exists and how your business could be leveraging this functionality. 
24 June, 2020
Within Fourth Shift, purchasing items to receive into inventory is a straightforward process.  To start, create a purchase order header that identifies the supplier. Then, add a line for the item to be purchased including the item, quantity, price, delivery date, and line-type ‘P’, the most-commonly used in this situation. However, there are other line-types that can be used on purchase orders. Most buyers are familiar with ‘G’ type lines for expense or general ledger purchases or ‘S’ type lines for sub-contract manufacturing purchases. But, have you ever used the ‘M’ type line for direct purchases to work-in-progress (WIP) for a manufacturing order (MO)? Let’s briefly explore how this works.
22 May, 2020
Is your business really capturing every cost associated with production? What happens if products need to be reworked or repaired due to errors in production, or engineering changes that didn’t get caught in time? Let’s take a look at rework manufacturing orders (MO) and how they can be used to capture incremental production costs you may be missing to complete your total financial picture of the shop floor.
12 May, 2020