More than three-quarters of the US GDP comes via services, according to The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, 2010. Smart manufacturers know this, and they’ve been looking for ways to differentiate their new products by adding new services to the value equation. Even now, according to the 2009 Annual Survey of Manufacturers from the US Census Bureau, manufacturers generate about 6% of total value of shipments from services. This includes installation, repair, and training support and services. In sectors such as industrial equipment or computers and electronics, that percentage is even higher. Yet manufacturers searching for service revenues should proceed with care: Customers demand responsiveness from service organizations, and they penalize firms that fail to deliver at world-class levels.

What does it take to meet world-class service levels? Simply this: staying one step ahead of customer inquiries and requests. Yet for most firms, this is anything but simple. It requires tracking every customer touch, transaction, and function; sharing that information with every employee who might touch that customer in the future; and monitoring and reporting customer service activities for day-to-day decision-making as well as strategic planning. Infor’s Service Management—a fully integrated, robust, scalable, and automated field service management solution for System i—improves service visibility and allows service organizations to proactively manage aftermarket services.

With Service Management you can meet customer demands, increase visibility into service performance metrics, and improve collaboration across the enterprise to find new revenue opportunities. Better customer relationship management increases sales opportunities and revenues while also boosting revenue per technician via improved scheduling. Not surprisingly, service profits also rise through improved forecasting and planning, spare parts management, warranty tracking, and contract management.

No two service organizations are alike, so you’ll need tools tailored to your firm’s needs—both in the office and in the field. Service Management includes all the flexible, digital tools you’ll require—with seamless, end-to-end integration including:

• Customer service interaction management/call management
• Service performance management for generating and maintaining complex equipment records
• Customer web portal for faster, more accurate response and a web-based service order dashboard for providing visibility and control to dispatchers, supervisors, and customers
• Electronic transactional capabilities, including Infor Barcode and RFID for tracking key components and high-value items
• Mobile support, including mobile service entitlement management (contracts, warranties, and service policies) and mobile connectivity and service scheduling with complete field workforce management, workload forecasting capabilities, and a dynamic scheduling assistant

As your service organization succeeds, Service Management can smoothly scale to meet growing needs by supporting new sites, partners, subsidiaries, and franchisees. It ensures that everyone in the organization has up-to-the-minute information for confident decision-making that improves customer satisfaction and profitability. How’s that for service?

Let us know what you think, we would love to hear from you.

Posted by Joe Marino, Vice President, Development, Support, and Product Management, System i

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.

In today’s marketplace, you need to constantly look at how you do things, and ensure you do them well.  You're off to a great start with a proven ERP system that works with your IBM System i platform, but you need to build automated processes that are carefully mapped to make your business more efficient. When that happens, you'll be able to work better, faster, and smarter than ever before. The key is to have a process mapping and automation tool that lets you quickly identify areas for improvement, reduce the number of tasks your teams have to handle, and apply your own business rules to software applications without modifying your ERP system.

Sounds good in theory, right? But you’re probably wondering where you can get such a tool. Well, you came to the right place. With Infor Workflow for System i, a drag-and-drop design tool, you can quickly create a graphical representation of any business activity. The tool provides you with:

• "To do" action automation. Once the process map is complete, you can specify how to automate steps and start a process. Any process step can automatically place an entry on a user's "to do" list.
• Automated task assignment. You can assign tasks to groups of users (or roles) and individuals. Your employees get easy access to the information they need to complete tasks. Plus, escalation rules ensure that important tasks are never forgotten.
• Automated business logic execution. Not all processes require human intervention. Infor Workflow for System i can automatically execute business logic, decreasing the time it takes to complete a process and reducing the number of tasks your employees must perform.
• Automated communication. The benefits of Workflow are not restricted to Infor ERP users. Any step in a process can automatically send a mobile text message or email to an individual or group of individuals, including suppliers and customers.
• Event tracking. Within the application, all activities are recorded and traced by user, date, and time—providing you with both an evidence chain and the ability to identify bottlenecks quickly.

Could your company stand to benefit from better communication, continual process improvement, and greater productivity and lower costs? Whose couldn’t? With Infor Workflow for System i, you get a complete ERP workflow, modeler, and business process management solution combining a graphical process modeler with sophisticated automation. Why not see for yourself?

We’d like to hear from you. What are you doing to work harder, faster, and smarter? Would our tool be of help? Please leave your comments and feedback here.

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

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

We know it’s been awhile since you’ve heard from us—but we think this is a great time to get you connected again so that you’ll have the tools you need to keep your System i platform going for years to come. We’re happy to announce the Infor Development Framework (IDF) technology, a next generation System i technology that ensures the future of your ERP software and allows you to use your reliable System i platform well into the future.

With IDF, you can protect your existing investments and gain cutting-edge features without having to go through an application or platform migration. You can also create intuitive role-based user interfaces and dynamic reports through simple configurations, and make your business and IT department more flexible and agile.

But that's not all. You can also better serve your customers, vendors, and partners over the Internet, by making your data available to them in a usable form, while keeping everything safe and secure. Plus, you can better support your non-ERP systems that help run day-to-day operations, yet are specific to certain departments—without burdening your support staff. In addition, you can create entire new applications that integrate seamlessly to your ERP backbone.

Finally, you can ensure that all of your systems work together, whether those systems are under one roof, in separate locations, or on different technology platforms. You can even tie in systems that are used by other companies, including your customers, vendors, and partners. Wherever your systems are located, you can make sure they communicate with each other.

Let’s dig into the IDF—here’s a run-down of all the parts and how each fits into the technology:

• Infor Enterprise Integrator—Rapidly create and maintain System i applications with this advanced technology. Your users will be able to extensively develop each application to fit their needs and integrate your departmental systems to your ERP system without IT intervention so that all your systems will look and feel the same.
• Infor Power-Link—Personalize your application, create workbenches, and get all the data you need with a mouse click using this full-featured user interface.
• Infor Net-Link—After you personalize an application in Power-Link, hit the "Refresh" button and this browser-based solution will immediately send your changes to a Net-Link client.
• Infor System-Link - Send XML data to any application that can receive XML—anytime, anywhere with System-Link.

IDF gives you a whole new range of choices—you can deploy your new application on IBM i, Linux, AIX, and Windows server platforms because IDF is written in Java, which means that it's platform-independent and supports Windows and Apple clients. But you'll still get the reliability, scalability, and lowest cost of ownership you depend on, because IDF is still built specifically to serve the dependable System i technology you’ve come to trust.

We have plenty more to say about the benefits of IDF, but why not see for yourself? Watch this quick overview video to learn more.

As always, we want to hear from you, what do you think about this technology?  We’re open to your questions and feedback.

Posted by Joe Marino, Vice President, Development, Support, and Product Management, System i, Infor

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

So, you’re asking yourself, “How do I make that happen?” The answer: MES. Implementing a manufacturing execution system (MES) integrates your business systems, such as ERP, with your shop floor equipment, increasing visibility throughout the organization. The MES puts in place process and quality management as well as helps manage production scheduling and sequencing, and creates an audit and tracking trail.

We recently hosted a webinar featuring the Infor MES solution from Paper-Less tohelp our ERP XA customers optimize processes and performance and transform mission-critical processes in scheduling, inventory, production, and quality into one integrated solution providing unparalleled visibility and management of manufacturing.

Posted by Ross Freeman, Senior Director, Product Management