Infor has announced the latest major release as it holds the Infor Velocity Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada (October 1st-2nd). The release includes some significant updates to its CloudSuite portfolio of solutions. Later in October, it will hold its EMEA Infor Velocity Summit in Amsterdam between October 22-23.
Three of the key core updates are a new GenAI Assistant, process mining capabilities, and ESG Strategy Management. Further improvements will help organisations automate their processes to increase efficiency, leveraging AI and Machine Learning.
Chief Technology Officer, President of Products
Soma Somasundaram, President and CTO of Infor, commented, “I am excited about the immense value these solutions will drive for our customers. Infor’s deep industry expertise is showcased through thousands of best-practice, micro-vertical processes built into the product.
“With each release, we increase the volume of pre-built experiences that harness the power of transformative technologies. For example, with embedded process mining capabilities, customers can quickly examine process efficiencies, optimize, and automate with minimal disruption to business operations.”
Enterprise Times also spoke to Somasundaram about the release ahead of the event. We will publish the second half of the interview later this week.
Infor GenAI Assistant
In October, Infor announced the early availability of the latest generation of its Gen AI assistant across all of its CloudSuites. The new Infor Gen AI assistant offers a conversational interface. It will allow users to go beyond the simple summarization of data content and have the AI assistant perform time-consuming actions.
Soma sees three levels of Gen AI assistants that Infor has now deployed. In the first, the Infor AI leverages the aggregated data store to create summaries of information. The second is where it also answers analytical queries in chat that go beyond just the information summaries.
Soma said, “One step above that is the real industry use case.” He gave a healthcare example where a nurse with a sick daughter can use Infor AI to solve several challenges. She can view her schedule, have a shift reassigned to someone else as a result and have a new shift assigned to her to meet her childcare responsibilities
Soma added a second example saying, “The same thing can be applicable for a shop floor supervisor who’s trying to shift a product from one production line to another, things of that nature that are much more involved.”
“These require a lot more industry wiring that allows for us to meaningfully execute operations behind the scenes to satisfy the request that comes from this user.”
The difference is that this new iteration takes actions on a request through understanding the data. Infor will continue to build out use cases for customers within its Industry Suite.
Using AI for data management
Specific use cases are always useful as they show the potential of the technology. However, one customer already uses it to help with a more generic data management challenge.
Elisabetta Venezia, Group Director, ERP System & Data Management, GMM Pfaulder, commented, “With the assistance of Infor GenAI, we have significantly accelerated our project with greater accuracy and consistency. The initial plan to cleanse our item master data would have taken several years with a two-person team manually grouping and updating over 800,000 items.
“We now expect to complete the project within the next six months. By eliminating duplicates with a cleaner database, we anticipate at least a 5% reduction in inventory costs, which translates to $1-2M Euro in savings.”
I asked Soma whether this use case could be applied when Infor looks to migrate customers from other systems to Infor. Soma sees that as a valid use case.
He used the recent acquisition of Albanero, a data migration and management solution vendor, as an example. He said the expertise to do this is now within the Infor tech stack. However, with the dust drying on that acquisition, it has not yet been deployed.
Infor Process Mining
This release also includes the latest iteration of Infor Business Process Mining. Infor introduced Business Process Automation a year ago. In its first iteration, the platform gleaned insights from users about the processes they were using.
This version provides enhanced visibility of processes that customers use with streamlined data definition, simplified export-import capabilities, efficient data loading, accelerated insights retrieval, and comprehensive insights analysis.
This release includes the ability for customers to map what the users are executing against, what they believe they should be doing and against best practices. Soma explained further, adding, “This capability will allow our customers to really see what the processes are being executed and then make adjustments and, either through automation or through optimization, change the process to really get more efficiency.”
Steve Turner, Director of Information Systems for Oberg Industries. “This transformative tool [process mining] provides visibility into business process events within our daily order-to-cash operations, highlighting areas for improvement and actionable opportunities. We anticipate by addressing these process inefficiencies and bottlenecks we will be able to increase our business throughput with existing resources over time.”
Infor ESG
The third element is some new modules for ESG Strategy Management and Execution. The modules will enable organisations to set, meet, and report on their organizational ESG goals systematically.
I asked Soma how comprehensive this new capability is and whether it maps to any of the existing ESG frameworks. He replied, ”The GRI framework and ESRS framework have been used to create reporting capabilities that we released in the last release. We continue to add more reporting capability.”
The Infor data lake stores Infor data and can also ingest third-party data. It is this ability that enables Infor to deliver a comprehensive ESG reporting capability.
The new strategy planning module enables organisations to set a vision and goals to compare their trending data.
Other updates in this release
Customers will need to review the full release notes when they are available, as Infor will have updated all of its Industry Cloud Suites with many improvements. One standout is that CloudSuite Healthcare has embedded procedure supply planning and distribution management capabilities, further enhancing the platform.
What is next
While this release is impressive, I asked Soma about the roadmap for the first release in 2025. Infor has two releases a year.
He replied, “There is a lot more we can do within the Infor data set for manufacturers who are our primary base. Those customers source their items from various suppliers, maybe in the Far East or Eastern Europe.
“We are looking to capture traceability information in an aggregated way. It will allow our customers to report on environmental data that is not just within the four walls of a customer’s enterprise but within their supply chain. We are working on those capabilities in the upcoming releases.”
Will that involve Infor Nexus?
“In fashion, where Nexus is very strong, certainly, we will use Nexus capability. In verticals which are not really adjacent to Nexus. We will use other ways to get data through, either through a partner solution or other means.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
With only two major releases a year, Infor often impresses with the progress and major updates it provides. This release is no exception. The release focuses on the big-ticket items that demonstrate the strength of improvements with its industry-specific solutions. However, is it missing a trick by not revealing many of the more minor, though still significant, updates it provides every year?
While firms seem to have cooled off on the focus on ESG reporting, it is not going away. Firms will need to surge towards net zero, and there is an increasing amount of legislation being passed. Europe is leading the way in this area. Even if the US doesn’t follow quickly, US firms looking to build business in Europe will need to adhere to the regulations. Failure to do so will see significant fines measured in global revenue.
Infor’s advances in developing Agentic AI are less encompassing than Salesforce’s but still significant. Its has focused on developing and delivering industry-specific use cases. That means that customers will quickly see value in deploying the solutions. Its research has highlighted that many organisations have failed to achieve that value with their own AI pilots.
For those organisations looking to find out more, the Infor Velocity Summits will provide an opportunity to learn and build connections with Infor and its partners.
