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Charles Phillips, CEODespite being able to streamline business processes, ERP’s growth has brought new challenges to the arena. “Today, it is very common for a product to be ordered by one company, built by another, shipped by another, and then sold by a fourth company, so it’s a network of partners. ERP wasn’t designed for that; it was designed for people who operate at one location inside the four walls of the enterprise,” begins Charles Phillips, CEO, Infor. Taking a ‘single platform’ approach, Infor delivers purpose-built ERP software that meets the needs of manufacturers and distributors in a wide variety of industries, aiding clients minimize costly customizations and take advantage of continuous innovation.
With an industry presence of more than a decade, Infor’s cloud-based solutions provide a holistic view of an organization. The company’s purpose-built ERP software helps enterprises work smarter, faster, and better. Infor offers specialized mission critical apps for the cloud—built to empower clients and help them achieve faster and deeper insights through predictive analytics. “The company’s laser focus on understanding and automating complex business processes, along with its commitment to constant innovation, has served customers well,” says Phillips. As a former mariner, Phillips is spearheading Infor since 2010 and has taken the company to new heights.
Holistic Visibility
Building scalable business applications with last mile functionality and scientific insights, Infor offers a wide array of industry-built ERP solutions. The Infor CloudSuite solution is a comprehensive industry-specific software that delivers the needed functionality and flexibility to adapt to business changes.
Another key next-generation solution designed to meet the unique requirements of businesses within discrete manufacturing industry is Infor CloudSuite Industrial (SyteLine).
The Infor CloudSuite Industrial helps manufacturers and distributors of all types improve productivity and respond faster to change
From selling to sourcing, manufacturing to performing, and analytics to collaboration, this robust ERP solution provides organization-wide visibility, helping manufacturers and distributors of all types improve productivity and respond faster to change.The solution empowers organizations to automate and streamline operations, stay productive, and make better decisions in lesser time. StyeLine also provides easy browser access in a unique collaboration platform, creating a new conversation and ensuring simplicity of information.
Accessible through desktop, iPad, or a smart watch, the solution provides anytime, anywhere access to information. Its deep scalability improves business efficiency, customer service, and overall productivity for a broader range of industries. For instance, Ellwood Group, Inc. (EGI)—a major supplier of high-quality, engineered, heavy metal components—needed to realign its systems across various sites to effectively monitor and coordinate operations. Upon a quick research, EGI decided to replace its old and disparate systems with the latest Infor SyteLine, which helped them gain control and overall transparency across business. Infor SyteLine allowed EGI to perform crucial and complex operations, such as tracking raw materials and resources at every level of production. Through this, EGI was able to retire the customizations to its systems that had been made over the years and reduce the overall cost of implementation and future upgrades.
Heightened Manufacturing Productivity
Manufacturers around the world need advanced processes for in-line sequencing, assembly line control, and serial genealogy to build complex products at scale. An open technology stack that can function on any infrastructure is Infor LN. It is built on a unique virtualized architecture that enables organizations to run the same ERP on a variety of hardware platforms and operating systems—bestowing maximum flexibility to deploy and manage operations.
Infor LN is specifically designed for project-driven, engineer-to-order, and work order based manufacturing companies. For instance, Ferrari, the Italian sports car giant, used Infor LN to outsource the responsibility for material handling to a third-party logistics company. The company was able to reduce the time it takes to run the Material Requirement Planning (MRP) process by four hours by collaborating with Infor’s development team. Ferrari also gained approval from the board of directors for Wave 3 of the Infor LN implementation by working with Infor Value Engineering to create a business case.
“With Infor LN, we changed our supply chain and manufacturing processes and through a new relationship we formed with a third party logistics, we set to zero not only the material we manage internally, but also the risk of lack of materials anywhere on our production lines. The end result was reducing lost production hours,” says Vittorio Boero, CIO, Ferrari
Putting Data to Work
From recruiting and staffing to asset management and pricing, Infor works with customers and product managers to identify industry-wide challenges and addresses those using elegant and understandable scientific methods.The company is currently improving its inventory availability and staffing allocations for hospitals and manufacturers, enhancing assortment for retailers, and reinventing price optimization for distributors.
Infor is creating models to help sales managers set prices that maximize both customer loyalty and their businesses margins. Infor’s pricing models allow ‘What-If ’ analysis to provide insights into the impact of future price changes. Instead of manually managing prices for each individual customer, Infor’s solutions help sales managers maintain dynamic customer groups using customer characteristics such as industry type as well as real-time product-specific financial performance, seasonality, and price response data. The dynamic nature of these customer clusters ensures that they stay up to date over time as new customers are acquired and current customer purchasing patterns shift.
“Infor LN is specifically designed for project-driven, engineer-to-order, and work order based manufacturing companies”
Moreover, Infor has an internal creative agency, Hook & Look, comprised of more than 80 talented employees including writers, designers, developers, and filmmakers, working together to enhance user experience. This energetic think tank is the engine that drives innovation around product design and user experience across Infor’s entire suite of business applications, as well as the agency that communicates Infor’s vision to customers, partners, and the industry. Formed with a singular mandate to create experiences that people love, the team works with developers and product managers to go past mere functionality and deliver a more meaningful user experience.
With several acquisitions, and industry honchos like Ferrari, Bausch & Lomb, and Heineken in its client base, Infor is looking forward to bring in innovative solutions and transform the ERP arena. The company recently announced the completion of a transformative upgrade to Infor EzRMS (version 20.x), marking a new era of forecasting and optimization that fortifies its hospitality domain expertise. For the days to come, Infor will continue to set the standard in the ERP domain, and help clients deliver better value to their customers. “The growth Infor is experiencing marks an inflection point for the company, where the heavy investments we’ve made in cloud software to meet the unique industry needs with an elegant user experience are paying dividends,” concludes Phillips
May 05, 2016
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