Sage 100 ERP | Schulz Consulting

How to enable Sage 100 wave picking and wave receiving in your warehouse

August 28, 2019 by Darcy Boerio Leave a Comment

Warehouses aren’t for storing inventory, they’re for moving inventory.

Efficient warehouses will find the fastest path to keep inventory flowing. There are a number of different strategies to accomplish this, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Some of the commonly used procedures include split picking, bin allocations for direct picking, zone picking, and of course, the topic of this article, which is wave picking/receiving.

Wave picking and receiving are processes that pre-determine the way you move throughout the warehouse to maximize productivity. Items for multiple orders are picked in one pass, minimizing pickers’ “footprints” and keeping inventory on the move.

Let’s break down the two sides to the wave concept. You may find that both are options that could streamline your operations, or perhaps just one or the other. Every warehouse is different.

Wave Receiving

Waves allow you to group multiple POs together to receive by item. For example, if you receive a large shipment that has multiple items for multiple POs, there’s no need to sort items by purchase order before recording receipts. Simply scan the items in, and they’ll be allocated to the appropriate PO.

Related and based on the wave receiving concept is ScanForce’s new Container Receipt Management (CRM) offering, which is the answer to efficiently receiving items from multiple POs that all arrive together unsorted in a single container. CRM allows you to receive items in a container while it’s still in transit, then verify contents once it arrives, as well as track container details such as container ID numbers and other shipment related info.

Wave Picking

For Picking, waves allow you to pick multiple orders at one time using the most efficient path through the warehouse. With wave picking, your picking order is sorted by bin location rather than SO. This lets you walk the warehouse ONE TIME, rather than duplicating efforts and making multiple trips to the same locations.

A simple analogy for wave picking involves going grocery shopping armed with a shopping list. If your list is in alphabetical order, you will end up going back and forth through aisles, hitting some aisles multiple times. You might go to the produce section for bananas, then over to the meat department for chicken, then back to product for grapes. And so on. Not very efficient!

Scanforce integrated to Sage 100cloud enableds improved wholesale, logistic, loading, shipment and processing within your warehouse

But if your list is sorted by aisle, and the aisles are sorted in location order on your list, you’ll achieve a seamless single path through the store and be on your way!

Read more on this concept here: A Warehouse Nightmare

Fully integrated with Sage 100 / Sage 100cloud

As with all ScanForce solutions, wave picking and receiving in ScanForce are seamlessly integrated with Sage 100, including Sage 100cloud Multi-Bin Basic if you have items in multiple bin locations. Information about quantities picked and received populate the inventory records in Sage for full visibility into whats been picked or received.

Want to learn more? Watch this 20-minute recorded webinar, and we’ll explain what wave picking/receiving is, and what types of warehouse operations can benefit from it. And we’ll show you how easy it is to implement in ScanForce and Sage 100.

Watch “Ride the Warehouse Wave: Wave Picking and Receiving for Sage 100

Managing a local server for Sage 100 – all risk, no reward

August 20, 2019 by Darcy Boerio

IT can be a thankless job.

When’s the last time you told your IT person (or whomever it is that is responsible for your network), “Hey, great job keeping our server up and running and secure this month!”? Chances are you haven’t. They probably only hear from you when there’s a problem.

But if they’ve managed to keep your local server up and running continuously and you haven’t been impacted by a cyberattack (think phishing, ransomware, identity theft, malware, etc.) then they deserve some love. At least for this month.

Every month, new varieties of threats are cropping up, and it can be a full-time job to keep up with it all. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the role of Information Security Analyst, described as someone who will “plan and carry out security measures to protect an organization’s computer networks and systems” to grow by 28% between 2016-2026. And at a median pay of nearly $100k, it’s not a cheap role to fill.

IT doesn’t get a second chance.

Have you ever tried to log in to your server and gotten an error? Maybe you just mistyped your password, but did your heart skip a beat?

What about backups? Many people only think about backups when they fear they may need to restore for some reason. “Do I have a recent backup? Did I back up the right files? Do I know how to restore them?”

Have you ever waited until the elements were at your door to try figure out how you will keep your business operational if your on-premises server is damaged or loses power?

IT can’t do it alone.

A recent survey of IT works showed that 62% of IT workers say that, “the biggest security threat comes from well-meaning but negligent end users”. In other words, the very people they’re paid to keep secure are the biggest threats they face.

Read: Yep, your IT guy blames you for your computer problems

What can you do to minimize the risks associated with having a local server?

For starters, read this article from the Sage cloud hosting experts at Summit Hosting on quick and easy ways to protect your data:

7 Ways to Help Keep Your Data Safe

You may also want to consider hosting Sage 100 / Sage 100cloud with a Sage hosting professional who is 100% dedicated to keeping your data secure.

Learn more at https://www.summithosting.com/sage-100-hosting/.

How To Add Tariffs To Sage 100cloud Purchase Orders and Sales Orders

August 13, 2019 by Wayne Schulz

Tariff Management With Sage 100cloud

The recent governmental activity has increased the likelihood that distributors who import goods from certain overseas countries will be assessed with a tariff.

While Sage 100cloud doesn’t have a native way to handle the tariffs your business may pay we have discovered the three most common methods consultants use to capture this new tax.

A tariff is a tax on imports or exports between sovereign states. It is a form of regulation of foreign trade and a policy that taxes foreign products to encourage or safeguard domestic industry.

Option 1: Use Sage 100cloud Landed Cost

The first option for managing tariff charges is to apply them using the native landed cost within Sage 100cloud.

Sage has a set of instructions on how to set up landed cost in Sage 100. This can be a quick and easy way to make sure all extra costs of import – including tariffs – are added to your product costs.

Using the standard Sage landed cost functionality you are able to allocate costs across your purchased items in one of four methods:

Weight
Cost
Quantity
Volume

Option 2: Use Scripting With Purchase Order

The second option which some companies have used is to create customization within their inventory items to:

Add a checkbox for “subject to tariff”
Add a field for “tariff percentage”

Then, using scripting, whenever an inventory item is placed onto a purchase order the system adds a separate miscellaneous code which contains the computed tariff for the line item.

Some companies have asked for this enhancement to make it easier to view the total tariffs charged.

Option 3: Use Scripting with Purchase Order and Sales Order

Lastly, a number of companies are using option 2 as well as creating a separate line charge on the sales order invoice to pass along the tariff amount to customers.

This separate line charge is similarly created using scripting which automatically adds a miscellaneous charge to any inventory item flagged as subject to the tariff.

The benefit of this method is the charge is separately stated so a customer can see that there wasn’t a random price increase.

Lastly, instead of using scripting to add a separate line item some users have opted to simply increase prices of the items subject to a tariff.

There are also various third-party solutions which can enhance the Sage 100cloud landed cost functionality.

No matter how complex your Sage 100cloud tariff situation, there are solutions – either built-in or custom – which can save you time processing shipments that include this new tax.

For more information on Sage 100 Tariff Management contact us here.

The SPA Tax Service could not be reached from Sage 100 ( Resolved with Payroll Update )

August 11, 2019 by Wayne Schulz

If you are using Sage 100cloud payroll version 2.18.5 or earlier you may seen an error message about payroll not being able to contact the tax calculation service.

The full error message is ” The SPA Tax Service could not be reached from Sage 100. The exception was: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. One or more errors occurred.”

To resolve this issue you should do one of two things:

Upgrade your payroll to 2.19.x which fixes the problem
Apply the following edit to your payroll 2.18.5 or earlier payroll configuration file
1. Make this change on your Sage 100 server
2. Browse to the MAS90 directory\Home\Microsoft.net\Sage.Payroll.Tax.Client on the Sage 100cloud server
3. Save a copy of Sage.Payroll.Tax.Client.dll.config then edit the contents as below.

Once you make this change you should no longer see an error message related to Sage 100cloud payroll tax computations.

The Sage100cloud 2.19.x payroll upgrade can be installed independently of the full Sage 100cloud accounting system and it is recommended that you keep current on the Sage Payroll instead of manually editing the configuration file.

Sage 100 Paperless and TLS 1.0 Requirements

July 24, 2019 by Wayne Schulz

Sage 100 offers an option to email various documents from within the accounting software. Doing so requires use of Paperless Office functionality which relies on several internet protocols to deliver the document from your Sage 100 system to an email server.

One of those protocols is TLS ( Transport Layer Security ). This is the successor to SSL ( Secure Sockets Layer ) and provides for a secure connection over the Internet and to your email server.

The current TLS version is 1.3 with prior versions having been deprecated ( discontinued ) by many email services.

Microsoft has indicated their Office 365 / Outlook email service will drop support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in June 2020. At this point anyone looking to connect to the Microsoft email server would need to be using TLS 1.2 or higher.

To provide the best-in-class encryption to our customers, Microsoft plans to discontinue the support for Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions 1.0 and 1.1 in Office 365 and Office 365 GCC as of June 2020.

We understand that the security of your data is important, and we’re committed to transparency about changes that may affect your use of the TLS service.

The Microsoft TLS 1.0 implementation has no known security vulnerabilities. But because of the potential for future protocol downgrade attacks and other TLS vulnerabilities, we are discontinuing support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in Microsoft Office 365 and Office 365 GCC.

Sage recently noted in their support forums that TLS 1.2 would only be supported for Sage 100 ( and Sage 100cloud ) versions 2018 and 2019.

If you have received email from Microsoft advising that TLS 1.0 and 1.1 support will be stopping soon then your best course of action is to upgrade to Sage 100 2019 or Sage 100cloud 2019 which fully supports TLS 1.2 and does not require a patch.

Users who cannot move to Sage 100 2019 can obtain a patch for version 2018. Sage indicates that they will not provide a patch for any version earlier than 2018.

Tariff Management With Sage 100cloud

Option 1: Use Sage 100cloud Landed Cost

Option 2: Use Scripting With Purchase Order

Option 3: Use Scripting with Purchase Order and Sales Order

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