Powering System i

Using Infor Workspace to create an automatic, customized collaboration process that supports effective and efficient decision-making across the enterprise.

by Soma Somasundaram, senior vice president, Global Product Development, Infor

Many companies have mastered the mechanical aspects of enterprise applications — deployment, procurement, data collection, etc. But even when they manage to gather the right information, most still lack the ability to leverage information in the right way.

It’s no secret: In manufacturing firms everywhere, waves of information swamp productivity efforts. Some employees desperately create their own, undocumented methods to filter the rushing flow of data, while others dive into unconnected pools of data, searching for insight before giving up, exhausted and demoralized. The end result is that every day, every employee is making crucial decisions based on incomplete information — or none at all.

The truth is that gathering information doesn’t make a company more competitive, but effectively using the right information does. It matters less how much inventory is in the pipeline than whether or not that inventory is in the right part of the pipeline to fulfill the right need. Likewise, what happened yesterday may or may not be meaningful today, but what’s happening right now always matters.

In his book The Velocity Manifesto, author Scott Klososky challenges corporate leaders to take a hard look at the “digital plumbing” within their organizations and take responsibility for making sure the right information is being efficiently pushed to the right users for immediate and effective decision-making. As the velocity of business continues to accelerate, this ability will separate leaders from laggards.

“If you want to be a high-velocity leader, you must understand what it takes to have the very best visibility into what your organization is doing and what the performance trends are — in real time… You simply cannot confidently keep pace unless you can clearly see the current status of the machine.”[1]

The complexity of manufacturing in a global marketplace requires multiple real-time views into the state of the “machine.” Customers want faster delivery, higher quality, and more flexible responses. Suppliers meet or don’t meet these demands based on hundreds or even thousands of small decisions made by multiple employees each day. The quality of the cumulative outcome rests on the quality of the information employees can use to make these decisions. Your company might be collecting stockpiles of potentially actionable information, but what good is it if only a handful of people use it strategically?

Infor Workspace addresses this imperative by providing a powerful and consistent information-access interface that’s also easy to use, helping users to become more productive based on context of usage. With Infor Workspace, enterprise applications can coexist with outside information, such as KPIs, dynamic alerts, and other tools that target key functions within the application. Two examples of these tools:

• Mapping for visibility into locations of goods, inventories, assets and supply-chain networks.
• Currency and time conversion to “normalize” the interactions of globally dispersed teams.

These tools also are context-aware, and automatically anticipate and adapt to user needs and interests based on the user’s role and the business function he’s performing at a given moment. The result is proactive decision-making based on the highest-quality information available to that user at that time. Instead of a user searching for confirmation that a delivery was made, for instance, the interface sends an alert of delivery status. Without the alert a user might find information confirming delivery, but it would depend on whether information was recorded, where the information was recorded, and the user’s ability to locate the information.

Infor Workspace’s “context-awareness” takes the variability out of these handoffs, turning them into an automatic, customized collaboration process that supports effective and efficient decision-making across the enterprise.

While there have been consistent interface advancements since business applications were first introduced, Infor Workspace is a completely new approach. It’s a step-function advancement, designed to revolutionize the way users work with software and each other. No longer will business and social tools be separate. Infor Workspace seamlessly melds them together, making it as easy to interact with coworkers around the world as it is to use the application itself.