Resources for Sage X3 Users

For all the Sage X3 data warriors, we’re spreading the word about Excel’s new feature that allows users to NOT drop leading zeros when opening files, NOT convert text to date, NOT convert to scientific notation, etc… This is long overdue and super useful.    WHAT DID MICROSOFT CHANGE?  Made the feature easier to find  Added more format support  Made the feature available in Excel for Mac  HOW IT WORKS  Microsoft wanted to address customers’ frustration with Excel automatically converting data to specific formats. So, they gave users the ability to change Excel’s default behavior and disable specific types of automatic data conversions as needed.  To do so, select File > Options > Data > Automatic Data Conversion, and then choose the conversion(s) that you’d like to disable.   TIPS AND TRICKS  You can enable or disable the following options:  Remove leading zeros from numerical text and convert to a number  Truncate numerical data to 15 digits of precision and convert to a number that may be displayed in scientific notation, if needed  Convert numerical data surrounding the letter “E” to a number displayed in scientific notation  Convert a continuous string of letters and numbers to a date  When you select the When loading a .csv file or similar file, notify me of any automatic number conversions check box, Excel displays a warning message when it detects that at least one of the optional automatic data conversions is enabled and about to occur when opening a .csv or .txt file. The message gives the ability to open the file once without converting the data.  SCENARIOS TO TRY  Based on the settings you chose above, try some or all of the scenarios below to test the increased control over data conversions.  Type directly into a cell  Copy and paste from external sources (e.g., a web page)  Open a .csv or .txt file  Find and replace operations  Select Data > Text to Columns, and then use the Convert Text to Columns Wizard  NOTE: Since the feature works by saving the entered data as text, you might see a green triangle with a Number stored as text error. This is expected. You can dismiss the error by selecting Ignore error in the context menu. Also, you may not be able to use that data in mathematical operations.  KNOWN ISSUES  The feature does not support disabling these conversions during macro execution.  AVAILABILITY  This feature is available to all users running:  Windows: Version 2309 (Build 16808.10000) or later  Mac: Version 16.77 (Build 23091003) or later  NOTE: Content for this blog post was originally posted on Microsoft 365 Insider, October 19, 2023.

This month we bring a couple of tips and tricks from Sage Enterprise Intelligence along with an offer on training that expires on December 31, 2023. DEFINE YOUR STYLE You can easily customize the look of your worksheets. Change your Groups and Columns formatting by applying different styles to a worksheet’s header, content, and total row. Modify things like the background color, font color, border, cell style and value formats. Copy and past styles into other columns or worksheets and share the final result with colleagues. For more information, see Formatting Columns and Groups. NEXT LEVEL DRILL DOWN You can save time gaining insights with the new Drill Down Wizard in the Web Workbook. When looking into the details of a given value, your drill-down results will appear in a side panel on the same page, saving you time from flipping between two sheets. Create different drill-down profiles to view results for different fields as they dynamically update in the new side panel. For more information, see Using the Formula Drill Down SPECIAL OFFER Save on eLearning until December 31, 2023. 20% Off 3-Month eLearning subscription 30% off 12-Month eLearning subscription Benefits of eLearning: Makes employee training more accessible Works as a powerful onboarding platform Improves knowledge retention Discover new capabilities Gain certification relevant to your role Reduces overall training costs For questions about customizing the look of your worksheets, the drill-down feature, or to take advantage of the eLearning promotion, please contact us.

We all know that we can put a requester on a landing page in Sage X3. But not a lot people know that you can filter the requester on the menu item by using the “where” parameter. Since a landing page query cannot be filtered on the front end, often times we need to create multiple variations of the same query pre-filtered with different criteria. The ability to filter the requester on the menu item level would eliminate need to create multiple similar requesters. We can have multiple menu items referencing the same query, but each with a different filter. The screenshot below shows that I have a requestor under YKAL039. However, I need a landing page for each shared routing. So I would create YKAL39-01, YKAL39-02, and YKAL39-03 all referencing the same YKAL039 requestor, but each would have a different “where” parameter filtering by different routing codes. A couple notes: The filtering field needs to be a filter criteria on the requestor itself. The “where” parameter value does not support any “or” operation. For more information about how you can use filters to eliminate the need for multiple requesters, please contact your Net at Work Account Manager.

Building on the success of the New Jersey end-user group in May, Net at Work hosted more 50 clients in Chicago and Salt Lake City over the last two weeks. A lot of fun was had along with some serious knowledge sharing. Presentations ranged from Finance Tips and Tricks to License Plates to spirited discussions about BI & Data. If you joined us, thank you so much for your participation and dedication to your company’s ongoing optimization of Sage X3 and related technologies.  We will be sending you the slides and tips and tricks recordings shortly.  It was so great to see so many of our clients sharing their knowledge and experience with each other and with us. We’re looking at expanding the end-user groups next year to two days to allow for breakouts and further involvement from Sage.  We look forward to seeing you all there!

Have you ever noticed the Substitution Product or Alternate Product fields when setting up Products in Sage X3? And did you wonder about their purpose? In this blog post, we will discuss the reason for the Substitution Product and Alternate Product fields and provide some real world examples of each. SUBSTITUTION PRODUCT VS. ALTERNATE PRODUCT FIELDS The Substitution Product  field (SBSITM) is used to automatically replace the current product with a new product upon sales entry (after the substitution date). For example, let’s say you work for a Pharmaceutical company and starting next year the legislation changed and you can no longer sell a specific medicine without a new legal sentence on the instruction slip. To comply with this legislation, you would need to create a new product code to identify the new form of the medicine (i.e., the Substitution Product) and starting January 1, 2024 (the substitution date), you would only sell the Substitution Product. This is very useful to retire legacy Finish Good (if sold) items. The Alternate Product field (RPLITM) identifies the product that will be suggested when performing a manual replacement of a component on a work order: This is useful when you can swap components in your manufacturing process to care for exceptional stock shortage. NOTE: When retiring a product, aside from using the product status, you can also use the start/end dates to better manage the transition: Life Start Date (LIFSTRDAT) will prevent you from entering the sales order BEFORE this date (usually for new go-to-market products) Life End Date (LIFENDDAT) will prevent you from entering purchase orders AFTER this date (usually for product retirement) You can also manage replacement while stock lasts (for the components production – raw material/semi-finished – only) . This usage will require the use of a phantom product. When a work order is created, the phantom product will automatically be replaced by its own components in the list of components of the work order. Beware this “phantom effect” only occurs if there is no stock available on the phantom (yes, a phantom can be managed into stock in Sage X3). The benefit is to set the product-to-replace as a phantom and to create a BoM with the new product as component. As long as you have the product-to-replace in stock, work orders will use it. When you run out of stock, the “phantom effect” will automatically swap the product-to-replace with the new product. And the best part is, it is totally compliant with the MRP processing! In addition to work orders, alternate products are used in Sales orders to substitute when a product a customer is ordering is not available for some reason and a different product can be used to replace it. In manufacturing, an alternate product can be used to substitute for a component that is not available. In Sales order, once an order is created and has not been allocated yet, if the product is out of stock and an alternate product is available to use, on the Lines tab, clicking the three dots next to the Ordered qty and selecting Alternate product will open the Alternate product window. Clicking the OK button will replace the unavailable product with the alternate product and a message will pop out asking to recalculate price/discounts. The final step is to save the sales order for the changes to take an affect. For more information about using the Substitution Product and Alternate Product fields in Sage X3, or for any other question about Sage X3, please contact us. NOTE: Portions of the content from this blog post came from Daniel J Moore and Vanessa Quwar via Sage City.

Retaining key talent is a top business challenge for the nation’s manufacturing companies, according to Deloitte’s 2023 Manufacturing Industry Outlook. One-third of the manufacturing executives surveyed named retention of high-performing employees as their strategic priority for this year. This pressing workforce challenge – which is intensified by the fact that employees departing by choice outnumbers layoffs and terminations, according to the Deloitte study – reduces manufacturing organizations’ operational efficiencies and profit margins. Manufacturers that make improvements to employee experience, however, will better retain top talent, thus driving quality output and profit generation. A Harvard Business Review study released in 2022 showed that companies that perform well on employee experience also achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction, which then translates to positive business outcomes. A Gallup report provided further specifics, indicating that employee engagement levels in top- and bottom-quartile business units and teams represented a 64% difference in safety incidents, a 41% difference in product quality and an 18% variance in productivity – all areas that directly tie to profits. What this underscores is that employees are the most important determinant of organizational success. Performance and productivity are enhanced when employees feel heard and cared about, are engaged in the company’s mission and have consistent opportunities to learn and grow. The impact of that positive employee experience is made visible through a digital operations platform (DOP) approach. CONNECTING THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE TO OPERATIONS DOP, a term coined by Forrester Research and adapted by AEM member and technology advisor Net at Work, provides data visibility across the manufacturing organization through best-of-breed, next-generation systems integration to help identify trends, relationships and root causes that may be tied to the employee experience. For example, by connecting the employee record to quality and production output, manufacturers can pinpoint current employee sentiment and implement training and development opportunities that enhance engagement to better achieve optimal results. A sample manufacturing DOP, with next-generation Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), like Sage X3, and Human Capital Management (HCM), such as Rippling, tightly integrated, gives companies the data visibility across the organization to better identify trends and root causes to make faster and better decisions to impact efficiency and profitability. A strong DOP can further link production and operational metrics that may be affected by employee engagement, including: Safety Incidents Effectivity Manufacturing Velocity Defect Rates Characteristics of a manufacturing DOP include adaptability for fast-changing business needs, artificial intelligence (AI)-based for efficiency and innovation and accessibility beyond the browser to streamline both the physical and digital experience for employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. While the goal of designing and maintaining a DOP is to have all technology components in place to support the entire business, the path toward that objective can be achieved incrementally. Setting an ultimate desired outcome and determining the appropriate steps in that direction result from collaboration with a manufacturing company’s technology partner. That advisor can help assess existing technology gaps, establish strategic goals, determine a manageable time frame, identify resources and evaluate other factors to create a technology roadmap and execution plan that ultimately achieve a DOP and deliver measurable outcomes. To learn more about incorporating a DOP approach to affect your employee retention, operational efficiency and profitability, please reach out to your Account Manager or contact us. Harold Ford, Employee Experience Practice Director at Net at Work, has helped Human Resources (HR) and Payroll departments build strategic value in their organizations since 1994. He has helped thousands of companies throughout North America improve engagement, productivity, and profitability, unleashing the power of their businesses through the digital transformation of HR. He is a member of the Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM) and has earned his SPHR and SHRM-SCP certifications.

Embedding external URLs on landing pages in Sage X3 can be used to show a map tracking your containers in transit, or to display external Business Intelligence reports and dashboards, or to give access to other applications from within Sage X3, and much more. It is not difficult to embed external webpages on landing pages in Sage X3 using the personalization tools – see the link to our webinar below – but there is a step that is sometimes overlooked.  Understandably, you need to be a Sage X3 Administrator to do this step. The key to getting external links working in Sage X3 is that you must first establish them as External URL Policies in Administration> Administration> Settings> External URL Policies: Once that is done, you can easily reference it on a landing page using the URL link. Here is an example in a Drawing widget: For more information on embedding external URLs on landing pages in Sage X3, please check out the below links or contact us. Embedding SEI reports in Sage X3 Learning Series: How to Personalize Sage X3 Calling X3 from External Applications

In Sage X3, you can set up different movement codes to define specific stock receipt and issue rules for some transactions. For example, a dedicated transaction associated with experienced users who can authorize the receipt to stock in A status and the rest of the users who can authorize the receipt to stock of goods in Q status. In this blog post, we will show you how to receive a purchase order into a specific location using the movement code. Under Common data, Products, Product category, select a product category. On the Receipts tab, insert a line after the Supplier receipt movement type. Select the Supplier receipt movement type and assign a movement code. Movement codes can be added under Setup, General parameters, Miscellaneous tables, Data code 14. Add a location to the line where you have entered the movement code. To add a new location first you need to create a location category under Development, Data and parameters, Tables, Local menus-messages chapter 2707. Add a Default location under product-site record for the location category selected above. Create a new Receiptsentry transaction under Setup, Purchasing, Entry transactionsand add the movement code under Stock grid. Finally, when you generate a receipt, select the assigned entry transaction and when selecting the purchase order, the location will default according to the setup above.         On the other hand, if I want to receive the normal receipts then I select the ‘ALL’ entry transaction and the default location will be different. Similarly, movement codes can be assigned to stock issue movements as well. Here you need to include the allocation and issue rules as part of your setup. For more information on using movement codes in Sage X3, or for any other Sage X3 questions, please contact us. NOTE: This content was originally posted by Joel Singam on Sage City, August 30, 2023.

Document Distribution for Sage X3 automates the emailing or printing of the different documents you need to provide to your customers and suppliers at the moment of the transaction. It helps your organization save time by taking advantage of the standard workflows functionality in Sage X3 to eliminate the need to print documents individually and attach them to emails. KEY FEATURES  Automate individual document transmissions: Sales Orders Packing Slips Bill of Ladings Invoices and Purchase Orders Certificate of Analysis and Safety Data Sheet Management One form/report per email with one or more selected recipients from the contacts. Traceability inside Sage X3 instead of a user’s email account. This will help to determine when the document was not sent and more details about the reason. Use Sage X3 Workflows with no third-party tools required. Optionally include other important attachments such as Safety Data Sheets. Net at Work Document Distribution for Sage X3 not only provides the ability to send documents at the moment of the transaction, it also offers bulk process functionality for Invoices and Customer Statements: Bulk Customer Invoices – Process to email or print all invoices. The function goes through posted invoices that have not been printed or emailed and emails it to the Customer Contact. This can be run manually or scheduled.  Bulk Customer Statements – Module that will allow the bulk emailing of customer statements by selecting criteria like Site or Business Partner. Customer statement format can be the standard or customized.  Want to learn more about Document Distribution for Sage X3? View recorded webinar Download brochure Watch video  For more information about Document Distribution for Sage X3, or any other Sage X3 questions, please contact us.