Analyst Perspectives

Infor provides industry-specific enterprise software that enhances business performance and operational efficiency. These verticals and related micro-verticals include manufacturing, food and beverage, hospitality, healthcare, distribution and retail. Infor offers applications for enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, customer relationship management and human capital management, among others. Infor’s strategy is to tailor software with a high percentage of specific capabilities and functionality for customers in its target industries, delivering a faster time to value and a lower total cost of ownership compared to general purpose systems. To execute this strategy, it continues to build out its platform to facilitate the execution of technical tasks. To support the need for highly composable business computing structures, it offers essential capabilities such as data integration, orchestration and governance. These data services have grown in importance with the rising adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI), which are highly data-dependent to achieve useful results. ISG Software research asserts that by 2027, almost all providers of software designed for finance organizations will have incorporated some AI capabilities to reduce workloads and improve performance.

ISG’s Buyers Guides have evaluated Infor’s applications as being exemplary in a range of categories including ERP, Manufacturing ERP, Financial Management ERP, Midsize ERP, Midsize Manufacturing ERP, Midsize Financial Management ERP, Workforce Management Basics, Multi-Country and U.S. Payroll as well as Field Service Customer Engagement, Management and Proactive Maintenance.

The company recently held an analyst event in New York to highlight its software investment focus, technology advances and product roadmap. Besides demonstrating continued expansion in the functional scope of its ERP, manufacturing and supply chain applications, Infor’s annual analyst conference notably showed off its progress in productizing process mining capabilities and in manufacturing execution systems (MES).

I commented last year at another Infor event about the potential for process mining in creating new sources of value from business software. The technology’s ability to support what in the 1990s was called business process reengineering (BPR) has the potential to significantly improve operational and financial performance. Unlike the BPR of the 1990s, Infor uses technology to eliminate or substantially reduce the need for (and cost of) outside consultants to achieve performance gains. Moreover, its process mining and analysis capabilities can be a potentially powerful, cost-effective tool for training agentic AI systems.

Infor’s process intelligence capabilities facilitate the use of its technology by business users. Rather than almost always requiring the use of outside consultants to construct a bespoke platform and process models, Infor offers a streamlined approach to process mining, intelligence and analysis. Process mining analyzes event data from the logs of software applications to understand how processes are designed to perform and how they actually are performed. Typically, the technology will show there are many variations in how a process unfolds in practice and the context in which those permutations occur. The results can be used to uncover the sources of bottlenecks, delays, unseen risks and unnecessary workloads that, in turn, allows organizations to institute improvements.

Infor’s Process Velocity Suite is designed to facilitate process improvement by combining process mining, automation solutions (such as Infor Value+ for AI and RPA) and Infor GenAI. The suite can overcome the practical barriers that keep enterprises from adopting process mining by eliminating obstacles caused by siloed process data, inconsistent data formats and incomplete records. It can do so because its ERP cloud suites offer a large catalog of standard business processes, which many customers use either with or without modification. The suite enables enterprises to quickly analyze how they execute core business processes, how that compares with their basic process design and then optimize how work is actually performed. The objective is to help organizations identify inefficiencies, automate tasks, and streamline processes for maximum productivity. One of Infor’s customers present at the event showed off how their company was starting to use the Velocity Suite and demonstrating its potential. It’s likely that a small but significant minority of power users will show that a do-it-yourself approach is feasible.

Agents and agentic AI are all the rage today. They can be a stand-alone technology, but they are even more powerful in enhancing the functionality and value of business applications because they enable higher productivity. This not only improves the productivity of workers (especially the white-collar variety) it also upskills them, giving them both the means and the time to do more valuable work by automating repetitive tasks, providing in-process decision support and reducing errors and risk through the use of AI-enabled task supervision. ISG Software Research asserts that by 2028, almost all business software providers will have augmented the capabilities of their applications with some agentic AI capabilities to lower costs, upskill users and improve customer service and agility.

Agentic AI holds significant promise because it can enable autonomous action, reducing time spent by humans on repetitive tasks and compressing task and process cycle times to enhance responsiveness and agility. It’s usually the case that a majority of decision nodes in accounting, finance, manufacturing, distribution and supply chain tasks and processes follow set rules with limited or no nuance. These lend themselves to using sophisticated robotic process automation. However, the remaining are anything but cut-and-dried, requiring actors to understand multiple layers of context sensed from a set of data and actions that are sourced from scattered islands of information and execution. Those tasks, in turn, are the major source of delays in decision and execution cycles and therefore avoidable costs. Agentic AI adoption is likely to trace the familiar pattern of going from simple to sophisticated in the familiar crawl-to-run change management progression. Infor’s advantage in bringing high-value agentic AI to the market is its process mining and analysis capabilities and data fabric that are part of its ION platform.

A second topic to highlight from the event is manufacturing execution systems. These are an increasingly important component of the applications stack as enterprises in discrete and process verticals pursue and execute technology-based smart manufacturing strategies designed to achieve competitive advantage and lower costs. Smart manufacturing (which I commented on earlier) is a strategic operating approach that aligns advanced manufacturing technology with system and process design principles to promote adaptability. It is a digital, event-driven, collaborative orchestration of physical and digital processes designed to increase productivity, efficiency, adaptability and resilience. MES’s use technologies to coordinate the planning and execution of even disparate operations within factories and across an entire manufacturing supply chain. ISG’s Smart Manufacturing Buyer Behavior Study found that enterprises are adopting smart manufacturing to improve productivity, achieve cost savings, make their supply chains more resilient and make more effective use of their productive assets.

With its focus on manufacturing-oriented verticals, Infor’s software has embraced the movement to smart manufacturing. Infor acquired Lighthouse Systems in 2021 to extend the capabilities of its manufacturing cloud suites. The software consolidates production, quality, inventory and maintenance data to provide immediate visibility and control across the entire scope of operations in production organizations, continually monitoring, controlling and optimizing production processes in real time. They enhance efficiency, ensure quality and provide valuable data for decision-making across manufacturing operations. While these systems have been around for a while, the adoption of web-based manufacturing systems has improved their flexibility and scalability, while the application of edge computing techniques reduces latency and response times to make control systems feasible. Their use of predictive and prescriptive AI to create digital twins of manufacturing systems enables enterprises to more precisely perform maintenance only when needed, potentially reducing downtime and lowering maintenance costs.

MES applications increasingly blend their traditional functionality with manufacturing operations management (MOM) software. MES initially focused on real-time monitoring and control of production processes on the shop floor, handling production tracking, work instructions and machine connections, while MOM handles a broader range of activities, including quality management, materials management, logistics, and maintenance. It integrates planning, execution, and monitoring to optimize overall manufacturing operations.

Midsize and larger product-oriented enterprises are increasingly adopting cloud-based systems to replace their aging on-premises applications, which are increasingly expensive to maintain and difficult to keep current. Cloud-based systems are either equal with or close to parity with these legacy applications while offering more reliable security and better performance. For most enterprises, AI, GenAI and agentic AI are more accessible and easier to adopt with cloud-based software. I recommend that enterprises that are looking to replace or augment their ERP and manufacturing applications include Infor’s offerings on their list of potential providers.  

Regards,

Robert Kugel