More Things to Look for at Inforum 2018

An earlier article on Infor discussed the findings from the Infor Innovation Summit 2018 this past spring and zoomed on to the vendor’s new operating services—Infor OS—consisting of enterprise platform foundational pieces, such as Infor Data Lake, Infor Coleman artificial intelligence (AI) suite, Birst business intelligence (BI), and others . A more recent article focused specifically on Infor’s horizontal and vertical industry enterprise software solutions, such as enterprise asset management (EAM), healthcare, and manufacturing.
 
Now, we will cover other Infor vertical and horizontal software solutions of interest and also take a look at some hints about what attendees of the upcoming Inforum 2018 conference in late September 2018 in Washington, DC, should pay attention to.  

Infor Retail Challenges the Old Retail Establishment

 
While manufacturing and healthcare are the largest industries served by Infor solutions, its software for retail solutions is Infor’s fastest-growing product category, albeit coming from a much smaller footprint. For a long time, Infor has had retail customers without being able to offer them core merchandising, business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce, or point-of-sale (POS) software solutions. Instead, Infor’s retail customers have customarily been using the vendor’s human capital management (HCM), workforce management (formerly known as Workbrain Workforce Time and Attendance), various supply chain management (SCM) capabilities (warehousing, transportation, etc.), EAM, financials, fashion product lifecycle management (PLM), and other important capabilities.
 

Figure 1. Infor Retail Capabilities
 
But with Infor’s 2016 acquisition of Predictix for machine learning-based retail demand and assortment management, along with the purchase of Starmount in-store management solutions including POS software that same year, and the acquisition of GT Nexus networked global commerce in 2015, Infor has become much more relevant to retailers’ core businesses (see figure 1).
   
In 2018, the vendor launched its own Networked Order Management to compete with the likes of Manhattan Associates, IBM, and Aptos in the realm of distributed order management (DOM) and omnichannel fulfillment.
 
The most recent expansion of Infor’s retail footprint came via the addition of Birst Analytics, providing a particularly dedicated micro-vertical focus (e.g., the fashion apparel industry). Given that these new retail products are delivered as software as a service (SaaS), Infor recently reported over 125% growth in year-over-year SaaS bookings for its integrated retail supply chain cloud assets (commerce network, warehouse management, etc.). This translates to double-digit retail SaaS revenue growth on a normalized basis. Infor also expanded into new markets (Australia and New Zealand) and doubled its revenue in Western Europe on an annual basis.
 
Coleman AI-based recommendations and automation will be an area of growth for Retail and Fashion. Coleman will help in terms of personalization—that is, using clienteling for fulfillment optimization to avoid stockouts (which can drive customers to competitors with “endless aisles”). The Coleman AI solution will help save a sale by applying a deep knowledge of customer preferences, strong personalization offers, and selling suggestions based on enterprise and social data trends. It can also meet customer delivery expectations with optimized fulfillment that taps into the customer’s personal supply chain (including back to the factory and up to the last mile).
 
Moreover, Coleman Image Recognition, which is built into Coleman AI, could help with the issue of accurate item setups. Approximately 90% of bad enterprise data can be traced to the item setup phase. As a solution, Coleman AI could reduce data errors at the setup stage by using image recognition to validate item attributes (i.e., size, cut, color, style, features, etc.).
 
Coleman AI also will eventually addresses the issue of assortment/display/planogram compliance, providing the corporate office with the confirmations that a “display has been set” by a store following specific directions or to match vendor requirements. Often, a corporate office will send stores photos to match, and vendors will do store checks and request photos, but it is challenging to review hundreds or even thousands of photos. As a solution, Coleman can use image recognition to analyze the photos stores submit. It can then validate correct setups and report exceptions. This can save retailers the labor involved in taking, sending, and reviewing photos and also improve planogram communication both internally and externally.
While Coleman is still in the development stage of these retail applications, Infor sees no shortage of use cases which translates to continued investments in this platform.
 
Infor is possibly the first retail technology vendor to deliver AI via machine learning, leverage the network commerce with product information management (PIM) to curate offerings, and put DOM at the center of its networked offering. Recently, Infor reorganized to improve the delivery of its brand promise. Its goal is to optimize delivery execution at the core of the go-to-market, which represents a shift away from its previous focus on sales, presales, and product marketing.
 
To enhance its continued success and deepen the focus on customer satisfaction, Infor has converged its retail SaaS sales and delivery organizations to achieve greater alignment between what is sold (promised to customers) and what the company actually delivers. Corey Tollefson, senior vice president and general manager of Infor Retail, will continue to lead the retail team with both the sales and delivery organizations under his direction. Infor Retail will also be working in partnership with the research and development (R&D) team.
 
Admittedly, Infor Retail is not yet as strong in core merchandising, loyalty programs, and B2C e-commerce capabilities—especially relative to competitors such as Oracle, JDA Software, SAP, and SAS. The major challenges Infor Retail is facing are that it’s still lacking in retail mindshare and products’ maturity, plus, some retailers taking the issue with Infor using the AWS cloud (from the retail competitor Amazon). Nevertheless, Infor Retail’s success is due to its strategy and vision, along with its offering a modern cloud alternative to the aforementioned old school competitors. With its converged commerce and demand management capabilities and its offerings in the enterprise, fashion, and supply chain categories, Infor finds itself competing most often with the likes of Salesforce, MI9 Retail, and Aptos.  

Infor Distribution Is Going Strong

 
It appears that four of Infor’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software systems are hubs for global Infor industry CloudSuites: Infor LN, M3, S3, and SyteLine. Each of these is the foundation of a specific industry-oriented Infor CloudSuite and will continue to be developed and updated accordingly. Users of all other Infor legacy ERP software are encouraged to upgrade to the particular Industry CloudSuite solution for their industry. (Infor will still offer on-premise deployment options on these systems.)
 
To be fair, Infor ERP SX.e is also a next-gen ERP system for distribution, but its users are mainly midsize enterprises in North America. Infor M3 can serve the distribution industry among larger, global wholesale distributors and be the Infor CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise anchor (Infor M3 has over 1,300 named customers and over 3,500 sites, with 100 of those currently based in the cloud.) Given that the key next-gen ERP cloud platforms are already released to serve their respective grouped industries, other legacy Infor ERP customers and partners/resellers have been forewarned that they will eventually need to move to those platforms.
 
Wholesale distribution, a strong industry for Infor, is used by many wholesalers, value-added service providers, distribution centers (DCs) and branch networks, route sales, and direct store delivery (DSD) providers. Those Infor Distribution customers’ customers are in turn retail stores, manufacturers, professional tradesman, institutions, restaurants, and buying groups.
 

Figure 2. Infor CloudSuite Distribution capabilities
 
Infor’s investment to the wholesale distribution industry goes beyond ERP (see figure 2). The vendor develops solutions that address the most critical needs of wholesale distributors, like pricing science and Infor Sales Hub, a solution with an intuitive and compelling user experience (UX) for efficient order entry and dealing with customers. The longtail custom products and consignment stock are other trends and capabilities that distributors increasingly need and that the vendor provides.
 
In addition to a full suite of integrated solutions that address all of the aspects of wholesale distribution, Infor offers a number of best-of-breed add-on solutions designed with wholesale distributors in mind. They include: customer relationship management (CRM); Rhythm B2B e-commerce; configure, price, quote (CPQ, from former TDCI); and Birst BI. For instance, the CPQ portal offers a self-serve order platform around the clock for both standard and custom-made products.
 
Coleman AI, another component in Infor OS technology, is an addition that leads us to expect chatbots and always-on customer service digital assistants, while its data lake analysis could enable intelligent supply chains, stock management, and channel integration. Last but not least, the aforementioned GT Nexus business network and commerce (with PIM capabilities) caters to the need for visibility over the increasingly global digital channel of distribution. Think of available-to-promise (ATP) capabilities with better analytics to predict demand.
 
One should differentiate between the Coleman Digital Assistant and the entire Coleman AI Platform. Coleman Digital Assistant is for skill building on top of Infor’s API suite, so essentially for building chatbots and voice user experience (UX) as a form of natural language extensibility. The Coleman AI Platform, once officially launched, will be for creating predictive models for many of the more proactive use cases mentioned. This is how Infor will embed AI predictions and recommendations based on the secure and embedded connection with ION.  

Infor CRM and Mongoose Low-Code PaaS

 
This brings us to Infor’s CRM subset of the customer experience (CX) assets, which stem from several acquisitions and internal development. These CX assets incorporate former Epiphany Interactive Advisor (with predictive analytics), internally developed Rhythm Commerce, former TDCI CPQ, internally developed contract lifecycle management (CLM) capabilities, former Saleslogix sales force automation (SFA), and Orbis marketing resource management (MRM) capabilities.
 

Figure 3. Infor Mongoose PaaS
 
Infor CRM solutions will be re-platformed using Mongoose, which has become a full-fledged cloud platform as a service (PaaS) used by Infor and its internal design agency Hook and Loop to extend and personalize apps in a low-code manner (see figure 3).  Having been spun off from the SyteLine ERP software development, the platform is now a fully native component of the Infor OS platform. Infor Mongoose enables rapid deployment of solutions via an HTML5 designer and theming capabilities. These capabilities are an alternative to customization, giving developers the ability to build once and deploy to any device.
 
This development framework also reduces the need to write code. There is a full integration of Mongoose to Infor ION, including alerts and workflow, as well as interfaces with the JSON syntax via RESTful Web Services and application programming interfaces (APIs). There are also so-called “outrigger connections” to access the tables and fields of external databases. The platform is multi-device ready, providing prebuilt, enterprise-class user security with single sign-on, which is automatically published for both browser and mobile interfaces.
 
Infor Mongoose is the foundation of the CloudSuite Digital rapid application development framework, which allows Digital Services to quickly build and deploy personalized enterprise applications. The Hook and Loop digital agency now has a dual role: to continue to develop Infor’s beautiful UX and the “next mile” digital strategy (using Infor’s AI, analytics, network, the internet of things (IoT), and data science); and to develop the “last mile” industrial ERP, CRM, SCM, and implement other enterprise solutions (see figure 4).


Figure 4. Infor Digital industry solutions
 
This is Infor’s novel approach of digitizing and scaling processes to make them more effective and impactful for today’s networked businesses. CloudSuite Digital leverages core data sets and enables rethinking and creating new ways of doing business, and delivering a new elevated experience, service, or product.  

Pay Attention to Infor SCM

 
It will also be interesting to watch for any announcements at Inforum 2018 about Infor’s new SCM capabilities, given that the GT Nexus network-based commerce is now central to all of Infor’s SCM assets. Indeed, how else could companies assimilate, analyze, and act upon information throughout their supply chain network at today’s speed of business? Customer-centric supply chains are all about aligning the entire supply chain to provide the ultimate level of speed, precision, and flexibility (see figure 5).


Figure 5. Infor’s total supply chain visibility
 
With GT Nexus’ geofencing of IoT) data streams and rich transactional data, companies could be able to achieve that end-to-end visibility nirvana (see figure 5). For example, augmented logistics processes could combine electronic data interchange (EDI) messages with real-time global positioning system (GPS) data. Such a combination of capabilities could address the current limitations to visibility in siloed environments or ones with a piecemeal approach to process workflows. In those situations, complete visibility isn’t readily attainable because the execution data doesn’t provide full visibility, the IoT vendor data lacks supply chain context, and a milestone-only visibility approach is logically limited by the speed and scope of the processes.


Figure 6. Coleman AI for supply chain management
 
For its part, Coleman AI tools could bring even complex supply chains to near total automation, with only exception-based human interventions. GT Nexus is also helping supply chain finance providers connect to the supply chain and the flow of capital throughout supply chains. Receivables and payables financing with rates being based on the buyer’s credit status and with rates being based on the network performance are already available, but even more supply chain financing should be expected down the track in terms of multi-tier inventory financing.
 
In conclusion, this article, along with the previous article on the most recent Infor Innovation Summit, has demonstrated that, although it may have appeared that Infor has bitten off more than it can chew, the vendor does seem to be digesting it slowly but surely. We look forward to Inforum 2018, which we suspect will be replete with interesting product news announcements. Stay tuned for more TEC analysis on Infor and Inforum 2018.
   

Related Reading

Infor—Seeking On-Premise Escape Velocity with Help from Coleman
Inforum 2017 Brings Together Technological Innovation and Human Compassion
Top Seven Takeaways from the Infor Innovation Summit 2016
2018 Transportation Trends: Can Uberization and Real-time Visibility Mitigate the Ongoing Transportation Crunch?
Aptos Engage 2018—“Retail Differently” for Retailer Survival