Infor has unveiled its first major update for 2024, and it doesn’t disappoint. As with previous updates, Infor has developed a rich mix of platform, application and industry vertical improvements. It has also launched generative AI capabilities and ESG reporting. Both these new features are available for early adopters, but only by invitation.
In addition, Soma Somasundaram, President and Chief Technology Officer at Infor, also revealed the next iteration of Infor RPA during a recent webinar that covered the latest release. Infor Value+ Accelerators are solutions built on top of the Infor RPA platform that provide hyper-productivity to customers. They deliver role-based process automation where a user does not need to touch a keyboard, Somasundaram claims, using process intelligence to accomplish tasks.
The first Infor Value+ accelerators are now generally available and include invoice processing, workflow, audit trails, and email summarization for customer service.
Soma Somasundaram, commented, “We’re constantly listening to customers’ pain points and anticipating opportunities that allow customers to be successful and competitively advantaged. When it comes to building solutions that are hyper-productive, our vision is to minimize the time customers spend in applications so that they can maximize their time focusing on their specialized work and creating value.
“Achieving this requires more than just humans and artificial intelligence working together. It also requires the right understanding of industry subsegments and individual workflows. As a company built around industry specificity, Infor understands the context of how people work so that we can build those best practices into our products to help enhance productivity. Infor GenAI is designed with this in mind.”
Infor Gen AI
Another big announcement with this release is the emergence of generative AI capabilities. Eamonn Ida, Head of Solution Marketing, Infor OS Platform, said, “We’re very excited to announce Infor Gen AI, all new generative AI capabilities that are being developed across Infor CloudSuites that will further enhance our industry AI solutions. These innovations will unleash productivity by reimagining efficiency, elevating employee work, and enabling business leaders such as yourselves to bring generative AI technology to your organisations.”
Employees can ask questions about data held anywhere in the system within a natural language interface without having to switch screens. Infor has identified use cases across different industry sectors, including healthcare, manufacturing and distribution, to improve productivity and agility.
Importantly, these new developments are underpinned by three tenets.
- A hyperfocus on industry value creation
- The democratisation of AI benefits throughout organisations
- Maintain data privacy and security
Infor generative AI uses the customer’s data within its data fabric, also provided by the Infor OS. It ensures that an organisation’s data remains secure. Use cases invoice the creation of product information, whether for a quotation or website. It can be summarised, translated, or expanded all through the power of generative AI. Importantly, the Infor Gen AI capabilities also include the interpretation of instructions from users, such as assigning attributes to multiple products or creating an exception summary for complex projects in industrial manufacturing.
Infor ESG Reporting
ESG reporting will initially be available for customers in process, distribution, fashion, and discrete manufacturing. The new reporting solution includes dashboards and built-in templates to support common ESG reporting frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). The templates are automatically populated using data held within Infor ERP, spreadsheets, and other applications.
The solution will enable organisations to deliver improved accuracy, transparency, and consistency in their ESG reporting. It simplifies data collection and enables users to identify the root causes of omissions or anomalies.
Infor Value+
Infor Value+ accelerators are broken down into three categories.
Value+ Automation Flow: These aim to automate common processes across organisations that are current pain points. They include:
- Invoice processing
- Workflow audit trails
- Purchase Order creation
- IT/Jira ticket creation
- PO, AP contract and sales quote approvals
Value+ Insights: AI analyses data to surface insights and actions that will help organisations highlight revenue opportunities and improve business KPI.
Value+ Advanced Workspaces: These surface business intelligence and key information that people need to do their jobs within their function and industry. The new workspaces are role-based and will include ones for:
- Supply Chain Directors
- Inventory Managers
- Purchasing Managers
- Purchasing Coordinators
- Customer Service Reps
Industry updates
While the above are new capabilities available in early adopter or general release, there are also a host of other new and updated features across the different applications and the Infor platform.
- Infor M3 (CloudSuite Chemicals, CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise, CloudSuite Equipment, CloudSuite Fashion, and CloudSuite Food & Beverage
- Infor LN (includes CloudSuite Aerospace & Defense, CloudSuite Automotive, and CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise
- Infor Syteline (Includes Infor CloudSuite Industrial)
- Infor Financials
- Infor HCM and Infor Workforce Management
- Infor Manufacturing Execution System (Infor MES)
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is a massive update from Infor and brings together some of the work that it has been leading towards for the last few years. It sees the evolution of its data warehouse to becoming a data fabric that includes the newly announced data lake house. The data fabric now includes streaming capabilities, metagraphs, graphing capability to access data. The datalake house provides a new capability to deliver data that is highly performant and usable in mission-critical situations.
AI, including generative AI, can now take advantage of this new responsive massive source of data to deliver insights and automations in real time to users. This takes the Infor solution to a level that rivals any other on the market. Alongside its well-thought-out industry-specific approach, its applications, while benefitting from an underlying platform, do not have some of the same idiosyncrasies as rivals.
Existing customers should delve into the full release notes to find some of the many new smaller features, updates and bug fixes that will also make their lives easier beyond the major new capabilities. Some of these capabilities will also be generally available in October, when the next release is due.
