Guest post by Robert Russell, VP, System i development

So much ERP functionality is untapped—not because it isn’t useful or applicable, but because it’s literally untapped or, even worse, unknown. Organizations run myriad applications today. Multiple ERP and extension upgrades often leave employees who don’t have access to those tools unaware of powerful (but not readily apparent) information that could improve their decision making. Infor Workspace changes that by extending a helping hand to access hidden enterprise application data through a common, consumer-grade user interface.

Workspace rolled out in spring 2011 to rave reviews from IT pundits and—more importantly—Infor customers. Soon to be released for System i, Workspace is built on Microsoft SharePoint and blends a common user interface, in-context collaboration, alert management, and business intelligence. Workspace provides a single sign-on to all applications that users can access via SharePoint’s site pages, reaching out to applications on a local server, in the cloud, or at an entirely different site, while presenting data in a consistent (yet customizable) look.

Kevin Prouty, research director for enterprise applications, Aberdeen Group, writes, “As you would expect, customers are very positive about Infor Workspace. Several have stated that its role-based approach to presenting home screens and dashboards will lead to productivity improvements.” Because the Workspace tools are context-aware, they anticipate and adapt to user needs and interests based on the user’s role and business function.

Seamless navigation across Infor’s browser-enabled applications (the vast majority of our offerings) allows Workspace to automatically present your employees with critical data they might not even know they need, motivating staff to tap into important application data typically not on their radar. For example, a customer-service representative takes a call and is immediately alerted (regardless of where the information resides) to a range of customer information, including:

• Location
• Time zone
• Currency preference
• Purchasing history
• Real-time product inventory level for likely purchases
• Optimum pricing options for those goods
• Contact information for, and access to, key internal and supply-chain staff

Workspace is simple to use, easy to understand, and offers your employees chances to learn, ask, suggest, share, and experience information in ways previously unavailable for enterprise applications.

“While there have been consistent interface advancements since business applications were first introduced, Infor Workspace is a completely new approach, says Soma Somasundaram, senior vice president, global product development, Infor. “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. We call it socializing the enterprise, and believe this kind of new user experience will not only result in dramatically improved employee satisfaction, but will also produce clear, measureable improvements in productivity, performance, and return on investment.”

Infor Workspace is currently available for Infor ERP LN, Infor ERP SyteLine, Infor EAM, Infor FMS SunSystems, and Infor Expense Management. It will soon be released for System i solutions, such as Infor ERP LX, Infor ERP System21, and Infor ERP XA. To help our customers embrace Workspace, we’re providing pre-built migration kits and incorporating the implementation into annual maintenance contracts with no separate licensing fees.

Are you ready to socialize your business?  Tell us, we'd love to hear from you.

As a manufacturer, you know the business environment is getting more complex by the day. It’s tough. Even though you're successfully using Infor ERP for IBM System i, you're still faced with market expectations such as customization and lower costs, as well as changing customer demand. You know that response to demand is critical, yet lengthy batch processing—and the inability to run multiple scenarios—stalls material resource planning (MRP) and other planning feedback, and cripples your ability to meet that demand. To continue competing successfully, you need a visual and graphical planning application designed specifically for your System i platform.

It may sound a dream, but the dream is a reality: Infor Visual Planner for System i, an advanced planning solution for our ERP customers on System i platforms. This module is designed for tight integration with Infor ERP XA, ERP LX, and ERP System21. Want to hear more about this application, which was built by planners for planners? This easy-to-adopt-and-use tool will help with:

• Master level item scheduling—Blend customer orders with forecasts.
• Multi-warehouse demand planning—Include orders from distribution sites and other production sites while planning the supplying warehouse.
• Requirements planning—Plan new supply (production, purchase, and inter-site) orders and changes to existing orders.
• Improved planning—Plan interactively so you can immediately re-plan as changes are made.
• Planned supply order release—Interactively review and release new supply.
• Planned demand transfer—Transfer planned demand to other production sites.

How would you like to improve capacity, deliver on time, effectively plan, and reduce operating costs?  You can do that and more with Visual Planner for System i, which lets you interactively plan production and purchase orders—simultaneously considering both material and resource/labor requirements—to meet forecasted and actual customer requirements. Why not see for yourself?

We’d like to hear from you. What are you doing to meet demand? Would our tool be of help? Please leave your comments and feedback here.

Posted by Ross Freeman, Product Manager, Infor ERP XA

Guest post by Dan Sundt, Senior IT Specialist, IBM

Your company is one of tens of thousands running IBM i. It’s possible that you’ve been running it for over two decades, from AS/400 to iSeries, System i, and now Power Systems. If so, you’re not unlike many executives around the globe in a variety of industries—you’re comfortable with the strength of the platform, you’re looking forward to continued low operating costs, and you enjoy the high ROI a proven platform delivers. But don’t get too comfortable and secure. Information technology evolves at a blistering pace, and there are now more ways for IBM i to provide competitive advantage, minimize IT risks, and improve profitability.

IBM has been putting intellectual muscle into IBM i, making it a strong business solution for today, tomorrow, and years to come. Last fall, IBM released enhancements to IBM i version 6.1, and recently introduced IBM i 7.1. This latest operating system release/upgrade ensures that your company is running a leading-edge business operating system with up-to-date business capabilities. Within the familiar structure of IBM i, your company can reap the benefits of enhanced functions including:

• DB2^® for i support for XML: DB2, the integrated database for IBM i, now natively supports XML. XML data can now be stored in its native format, split into relational database columns, or created from existing database objects. Support for OmniFind Text Search in DB2 adds simpler access to non-structured data that is often stored in XML format. DB2 for i support for XML helps companies exchange information between customers, suppliers, and partners, improving communications with external applications and organizations.
• PowerHA™ SystemMirror for i: Asynchronous geographic mirroring with PowerHA extends the distance supported for multisite DR solutions, and supports both internal disk and SAN-based solutions. New PowerHA LUN level switching provides a data center a high-availability solution, where a set of disks on IBM DS8000 or IBM DS6000 are automatically switched between servers for scheduled maintenance or in the event of a failure. PowerHA allows a company to extend the distance between locations for disaster recovery implementation, thus providing a robust, easy-to-manage, high-availability disaster recovery solution.
• Virtualization enhancements: Virtualization support with PowerVM is extended to enable IBM i 6.1 to host IBM i 7.1 partitions and storage—functionality that allows for simpler testing of a new release before a software upgrade. IBM i 7.1 also can host an IBM i 6.1 partition, enabling companies to keep an application that requires an earlier release after upgrading their main application environment. This support is available with POWER6® and POWER7™ servers, and IBM i also supports AIX® and Linux® client partitions. With the increased flexibility available via virtualization enhancements, companies can reduce IT infrastructure costs and, because they are no longer locked into their existing system or applications, are afforded the freedom to upgrade while knowing key applications can migrate with them.
• Systems management enhancements for IBM Systems Director Navigator for i: Allows companies to set a target server that can run IBM i 5.4, 6.1, or 7.1, thus enabling the management server to run in one place with a single browser, and to be used in managing multiple operating system environments. Navigator’s performance management and investigator capabilities are enhanced with additional storage and tape metrics, plus disk response time and Java memory perspectives. IBM Systems Director management server is also enhanced to monitor and manage target IBM i environments, including management of program temporary fixes (PTFs). Systems Director provides an integrated platform management solution for IBM i and heterogeneous servers that, along with system management enhancements, delivers evermore simplified systems management and, thus, reduced operational costs.
• Security enhancements: Allows an administrator to turn on and off ASP encryption (which became available with IBM i 6.1), as well as permitting the data encryption key to be changed for existing users. A new database feature called “field procedures” (user-written exit programs executed every time a column is changed or new values are inserted) enables column-level encryption in a database table for sensitive fields of data without requiring any application changes. The IBM i 7.1 security enhancements both improve system performance (application changes take a significant amount of time as all the data in the disk pool needs to be processed) and, more importantly, allows companies to establish the appropriate level of security for specific sensitive data.
• Others: Rational^® software development product enhancements (such as IBM Rational Open Access: RPG Edition, which simplifies the development of transaction processing applications for mobile devices and web services), Zend PHP enhancements, web-application serving enhancements, and more. A long list of IBM i 7.1 features allows clients to reduce cost, improve service, and manage risk of their IT infrastructures.

If your company sat on the sidelines while other firms took advantage of IBM i 6.1 upgrades, you’ll be pleased to learn that it’s possible to leap directly to 7.1 from IBM i 5.4.

What’s the bottom line? You can now reduce costs, improve service, and better manage the risks of your IT infrastructure with these just-released IBM i 7.1 enhancements. Better yet, more enhancements are on the way. Perhaps most importantly, IBM i 7.1 is supported on a wide range of new and existing hardware: Power Systems servers and blades with POWER7 processors, Power Systems servers and blades with POWER6/6+ processors, and System i servers with POWER5/5+ processors.

Your choice of IBM i has kept your company competitive and growing for a long time. Why not leverage the latest business advantages found in IBM i 7.1?

Spending on information technologies (IT) is heating up in most industries. For example, Gartner, Inc. recently raised its growth prospects for worldwide IT spending to $3.4 trillion in 2010, a 5.3% increase over 2009; Gartner projects $3.5 trillion in spending for 2011, a 4.2% increase from 2010 [www.gartner.com]. Manufacturers are once again investing to improve infrastructures and grow their businesses. Yet after the last two years, manufacturers also realize that every IT  dollar counts—and needs to pay off sooner rather than later.   

A recent study of System i users conducted by The MPI Group (and sponsored by Infor) showed that all the participating System i manufacturers believe that return on investment is an important purchasing criteria: 75% said “extremely important” and 25% said “somewhat important.” Not surprisingly, 71% of these manufacturers measure ROI. Savvy executives have long known that in making IT purchases, it’s especially important that they project total cost of ownership (TCO) over the life of the investment.

Yet many manufacturers lose that TCO focus after a few months or years. Long-term considerations sometimes fade as systems become familiar (i.e., same old, same old) and newer IT options entice buyers. Those firms need to reassess their System i capabilities and potential, evaluating ongoing TCO. What will they likely find? That their cost of ownership is steadily decreasing, especially if their systems (as is typical) have been functioning well and they’ve effectively managed their IT assets.

Tens of thousands of manufacturers still prosper on the System i platform, leveraging previous investments over an expanding lifetime. They’re putting freed-up IT dollars into new System i solutions to stay current with IT trends—without the expense or pain of a platform change. For example, they’re upgrading System i-based ERP systems via Infor’s Flex Upgrade and Flex Exchange programs. Others are extending ERP functionality with new System i applications from Infor, such as performance management (PM), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply-chain management (SCM).

Posted by Kari Miller, Senior Director, Product Management, System i