Ingve Brunvoll
Many Infor M3 customers aim to get more control of their Master data: Items, prices, warehouse, sourcing setup, and so on. The challenge is to detect and immediately take action when the Master data changes in their ERP system.
This gets more difficult in a normal business setting where different people are doing different master data updates to the system at different times. Typically these changes are made without alerting and notifying the other users that need to run other programs when these changes happen. In this article, I will present a solution for capturing changes in Infor M3 Master data. Event-based M3 triggers configuration makes it possible to send the changes to Vince Butler (VBU) as it happens. VBU process the event message further and alert other users about the changes with old and new values, timings, and who made it.
Master data security and organizational constraints - Infor M3
Many customers have segregation of duty rules to prevent one person from updating everything in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. It could be easier if one single role/person could do everything in the ERP in many cases. But from a company security perspective, it could be a high risk to hand over the whole system and all the master data. It contains one single role/person. Consequently, it is good practice to split different master data maintenance, and transactional tasks into different roles and only give each role a subset of the ERP programs required for their process tasks. If you are interested in M3 Governance and maintenance, you should read more about Vince Security (VSE). The VSE application will make it easier to maintain M3 roles and users and find potential SOD violations.
A Solution using Vince Butler
So how should an Infor M3 customer handle good management of master data with security constraints in mind? Different roles and users need to be informed of changes relevant for them to complete their required actions and tasks. A proposed solution I will show below is to use alerts and reports in Vince Butler(VBU) driven by the Infor M3 Event-driven technology architecture components.
Let’s take an example from one customer in the illustration below:
There are two main roles in this example: Masterdata controllers and Financial controllers, with different responsibilities and according to the SOD rules. Masterdata controllers can again be split into four sub-roles: one responsible for updating vendor purchase contracts, one for the item/warehouse supply chain setup (a third party Supply Chain system integrated M3 like Relex is often involved), one responsible for item updates, and the last one is responsible for the Item/Financial setup part like Customs stat. Number.
As some of these parameters change, it may affect the item cost. It is the Financial controllers’ responsibility to keep the item cost correct at any time, and they also run the product costing M3 update program like PCS280/PCS290 when changes happen. Relevant changes can be seen in Vince Butler Dashboards as soon as they are delivered from M3.
Masterdata controllers may make a lot of daily master data updates in M3. They can also use Vince Excel (VXL) tools for larger bulk updates to M3 using API. Therefore, other roles need to know what has changed and how the changes will affect them. Vince Butler will need to target each role, meaning setup changes they want to subscribe to and provide them with the necessary targeted information in Dashboards or delivered as email alerts.
Implementation
Your company needs to purchase Vince Butler (VBU). After it is installed and configured, the next step is to establish contact with the M3 Event Hub engine from VBU and decide the fields and tables to be tracked. In this case, we are only interested in targeted table changes that can affect cost price, causing a new cost analysis to be run. In this case, four tables and seven fields will be set up for tracking changes. Then it is time to implement the Event Analytics rules for the seven fields. In Infor M3 On-Prem version, these rules are implemented in Drools language.
When all those are deployed, next will be set up in VBU will start listening to the previously implemented events. You have also prepared all VBU Statistics definitions used to store the data pushed to it from M3 for the changes in the duties. After finalizing duty setups, you will now see that VBU is added as a subscriber in Event Hub
You can now wait and listen for changes. Changes in the fields in M3 will contain who made it, the old and new value, program updates, and more. If you are a Vince Butler administrator, you can first confirm that the events are delivered under Administration/External Events.
