Infor : Technology excellence for manufacturing industry

On May 31, 2013

Mr. Souma Das – Director Infor

Q. What are Infor’s latest initiatives especially in the manufacturing space? Which are your focus areas?
Manufacturing as a sector has always faced the challenge of innovating and introducing new products in the zeal of addressing numerous customer choices and change. This complexity further brings in the need of smarter enterprise application software which can understand the specific needs of assimilating processes, automation, forecast demands and generating profitability whilst adhering to compliance.

At Infor, we understand that every industry and market has unique needs and hence believe in providing specialised solutions catering to the same. Emphasising this fact, our approach is to provide customers with industry-specific software applications that require minimal modifications and meet the needs of our customers in their specific industries. Currently Infor serves more than 7000 industrial manufacturers helping them to improve efficiency, profitability, and sustainability with these solutions tailored to the needs of both discrete and process manufacturers. Infor caters to a wide gamut of verticals across the manufacturing sector which include automotive, hi tech electronics, furniture & fixtures industry, consumer packaging goods, medical devices, metal & plastic fabrication.

Our specific offerings includeInfor Industrial Manufacturingwhich is a purpose-built solution suite featuring manufacturing best practices across key verticals.

Some of the many benefits that our customers have received from Infor Industrial Manufacturing are:

Improve global supply chain planning and transparency across all suppliers and business partners within the extended supply chain.
Achieve a higher level of performance with intelligent scheduling and dispatching tools that allow higher resolution rates and a shorter order-to-cash cycle to increase profits and improve customer loyalty.
Efficiently and effectively manage engineering changes across all aspects of the business and supply chain.
Quickly and accurately create quotes, submit bids, and launch new products.
Keep equipment, facilities, and vehicle assets in top shape to help cut purchasing costs, inventory levels, and inventory carrying costs, while maximising profits.
Gain quick, 24×7 access to critical data from all business areas and for all key stakeholders-both internal and external to the organisation.
Implement new collaborative methods and technologies to quickly respond to dynamic market shifts, customer expectations, global competition and supply chains, cost fluctuations, and accelerated innovation cycles.
Gain complete, real-time visibility into valuable sales and operational KPIs, and take action immediately when needed.

Our second offering is Infor LN ERP solution which has helped our customers efficiently plan, project costing, purchasing, and production of all of which are integral in thequest to win and service customers profitably. The product’s ease and specialization approach towards manufacturing issue are the key factors to the selection success of the product.

Infor has extended its unique services to key industrial manufacturing customers such as Dalal Engineering Pvt Ltd, a 55 year old manufacturer of stainless production equipment for the pharmaceutical, chemical and textile sectors. It is deploying Infor LN to optimise its manufacturing capabilities. The application will help DalalEngineering boost profitability and achieve robust growth. Dalal Engineering, based in Thane, is taking advantage of the ERP application’s new localisations for the Indian market.

The ERP software will help Dalal Engineering to obtain information and quantitative measurements for all facets of the business including, transfer of data in terms of masters and opening balances.Infor LN was selected based on Infor’s extensive knowledge and experience in this domain. The latest release of the software introduces new technologies that transform the user experience for greater productivity and connectivity. Infor LN provides complete support for managing various operations, support for all manufacturing types, flexible architecture and enterprise planning to improve supply chain performance. There has also been a successful implementation of Infor LN with PLM (product lifecycle management) at Transparent Energy Systems Pvt. Ltd a technology leader in the area of waste heat recovery systems, ammonia absorption refrigeration plants and other industrial processes for conservation of water, energy and environment. Transparent Energy Systems choose Infor LN for its extremely rich and deep “turnkey projects functionality” specific to many Transparent projects with bare minimal customizations. As a result Transparent Energy Systems can now capture multiple details and generate various financial reports to comply with company and government regulations. Transparent Energy Systems had the advantage of packaged integration between ERP Enterprise and PLM to support 15 PLM users.

Infor’sinnovative offering is Intelligent Open Network i.e Infor ION which provides the connective fiber at the core of our suite architecture, using the power of the cloud to help change the way you work and make speed a competitive advantage. With Infor Ming.leTM, we have offered our customers with a comprehensive platform for social collaboration, business process improvement, and contextual analytics so that no element of a business ecosystem is untouched.

Q. How do you encounter the needs of INFOR software solutions in domestic and industrial market? What are the market opportunities for INFOR software solutions in India? How do you plan to position these products here?
Infor understands the fact that every market has a different need and approach and hence we design our solutions keeping in mind these aspects according to the demographic aspects so that they are in the best interest of our customer present across the globe. At Infor special attention is given to identify issuesat the ground level as we understand each market has a different set of customer sentiment impacting the overall business growth of an enterprise.

Recognising the potential and scope for enterprise applications in growing markets, especially with its micro-vertical focused approach to provide solutions to best fit the demanding requirements of different sectors, Infor has outlined strategic roadmap for its customers in India by bringing in technology innovation.

Infor started operations in 2002 and has since grown to be a $2.8bn company and has evolved as a brand to establish its niche positing allowing it to explore wider opportunities across key industry sectors and geographies around the world. Over the last 2 years Infor revenues grew 22% in India contributing to the country’s growth story. With some of the best manufacturing brands present in India,Infor’s manufacturing basedcustomers cover many different industries from automotive, high-tech electronics, to engineering-to-order,metal fabrication and ship building.

We believe there is a wide scope of opportunity yet to unfold in the manufacturing segment primarily due to two reasons:

Firstly, India as a market has some of the best industrial manufacturing brands due to the wider and complex market needs, availability of numerous R&D and manufacturing plant set up which have the requirement of automated systems contributing to their right go-to-market strategy ; technological innovations of Infor offering customised solutions can be the accelerator for the same
Secondly,our competitors in the enterprise application space have created an environment of shipping incomplete software that requires extensive, expensive system integration work to make the software meet their needs. We certainly want to exploit this opportunity as we concentrate on creating differentiation by providing specialised solutions catering to the Indian market needs ultimately helping us contribute to the success of our customers and additionally helping in getting more and more brands associated with us.

Infor is one of the unique players that realises the potential of manufacturing sector and we are extremely proud to mention that we invest heavily in addressing the needs of this segment. Currently, we have hundreds ofmanufacturing brands in our portfolio right across India. Our specialised products like Infor M3 designed for companies that make, move, or maintain products delivers an unmatched user experience and a broad array of integrated applications. This product is a centralised multi country, multi-lingual, multi currency, multi-company, multi-site solution with the flexibility to adapt to the changing business needs particularly in food & beverage, fashion and heavy equipment after sales.

Providing flexibility in managing mixed-mode and complex environments, our products essentially are best suited for many micro-verticals within the manufacturing sectors of India.

Q. What is your marketing strategy for India?
Infor is one of the world’s largest suppliers of enterprise applications and services, helping more than 70,000 large and mid-size companies improve operations and drive growth across numerous industry sectors.

Some of key aspects of our marketing strategy in India include:
Specialized approach: As a company we understand that the need of enterprises across the globe include essentially revolve around technology solutions that cater to their specific requirement according to the localised market keeping in mind business profitability at an optimized cost. At Infor, we emphasize in addressing these needs. Thus, we provide specialised applications tailor made industry wise catering to the specific needs of its target industries (including Automobile, Fashion, Food & Beverage etc.) to minimize the time to value for its customers

Infor thus stands by its tagline “Specialized by Industry. Engineered for Speed”. Our tag line gets proven by the below facts, where we clearly stand out vis-à-vis our competitors by capturing key customers across varied industry verticals.

To substantiate this ourglobal customers include:

19 of the top 20 aerospace companies
12 of the top 13 high tech companies
10 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies
43 of the top 50 industrial distributors
26 of the top 35 global retailers
5 of the top 9 brewers

In recent years, enterprise business applications as a model has also seen major technological advancement as per the growing customer need, competitive business scenario and the need to take business decisions faster.

Innovation: Innovation is at the heart of Infor’s strategy (investing around $300m annually) which has helped the company transform businesses organically across the world by a mature approach of understanding the specific need and offering solutions catering to the same. This has further enabled the brand to capture significant presence as more and more brand associate by selecting Infor vis-à-vis its competitors because of the right solution offering.

Localization: With strong expertise in business applications space, Infor focuses on understanding market trends, analysing client requirements, gaining expertise in emerging technologies and helping clients enhance business potential by planning, architecting and integrating the right solutions.using pre-configured templates for verticals. Infor emphasises on focused partner engagement programs so that our customers get the best results in tier-2 and tier-3 segments of India as well getting the best advantage through these strategic alliance

Flexibility of deployment : With every business now expanding horizons across geographies, business eco-systems are getting diversified, organizations are also looking for enterprise applications as per their deployments needs such as

On premise applications
On demand applications/ cloud based applications
Hybrid model including (mix ofonpremise + cloud)

Understanding the fact that one size/approach doesnot fit all, we as a company help choose customers their deployment option accordingly and this way we help business expenditure with maximum ROI.

Inorder to tie these marketing strategies, Infor engages heavily in stakeholder engagement programs, customer-connect sessions and media roundtable programmes which help in educating and communicating appropriate messages helping more and more brands to get associated with us. With a strategic marketing approach designed specifically for CIOs of India, Infor effectively utilises various channels of marketing to convey and capture the attention of Indian CIOs/CXOs as the partner of choice for their needs.

Q. Which are the some of your pioneering products you introduced in the market to face the competition? Are there any plans to launch new products?
Infor is fundamentally changing the way information is published and consumed in the enterprise. Our products outstand offered are perfect solutions to the enterprises to carry out their business effectively.
Infor’s pioneering products include:

Infor LN, is the most powerful and comprehensive system available for managing the demands of complex, global operations. It has proven itself in a wide variety of engineering-based industries including automotive, equipment, high tech and electronics, and aerospace and defense. It is the only full-featured manufacturing solution that completely and simultaneously supports all of the production processes commonly found in modern manufacturing from engineer-to-order to repetitive. Infor LN helps to fine-tune business processes quickly and adjust to disruptions in the business world without disrupting the business.
Infor ION,enables intelligent business operations by simplifying integration between disparate systems, while combining contextual business intelligence, common reporting and analysis, streamlined workflow and business monitoring in a single, consistent architecture. The solution also unifies reporting services, mobile services, and cloud services into one elegant network
Infor Ming.le,TM is a comprehensive platform for social collaboration, business process improvement, and contextual analytics. One can organise conversations into enterprise wide streams and share key screens, data, and attachments, saving time and allowing them to focus on what matters most.

Q. What are the factors that have enabled you to consistently satisfy theentire supply chain?
Infor Supply Chain Management combines best in class solutions with industry-specific functionality, giving you the power to plan and execute your supply chain strategies faster and more profitably, from strategic and tactical planning to execution. With analytics at the core, you’ll get the tools you need to optimise your end-to-end supply chain and harness the power of social networking to collaborate more effectively internally, as well as with customers, partners, and suppliers. Gain greater visibility into your supply chain to optimize utilisation of resources and labour, improve inventory and shipping accuracy, deliver the perfect order every time, and respond faster to customer opportunities and market fluctuations.

Q. Could you brief us more about Infor’s international business?
Infor has customersin 194 countries including a strong foothold in India. We help more than70,000 customers to improve operations, drive growth and quickly adapt to changes in business demands. With operations running across APAC, Middle East and Africa, Americas and Europe markets, Infor as a brand has touched the lives of customers across the world by being a global company with local presence and experience. With innovation, specialisation of software solutions and location as our stronger strategies , we continue to win business in varied geographical regions.To externalise all the localisations outside the core software, Infor has launched a framework called local.ly to bring in local aspects of our solutions.

Q. Could you brief us on Indian & Global perspective of ERP solutions industry?
Inrecent times, the ERP scenario in India is witnessing a rapid growth. A number of manufacturing firms, automotive, steel, oil, textile and pharmaceutical companies embracing ERP implementations havehelped in the growth of this software solution. Apart from the realisation of a software solution that stands as the backbone for Indian industries ERP solutions are needed as businesses now need collaborated solutions that can essentially help them address bring in faster decisions with the changing customer choices.

Infor has the edge vis-à-vis competitors as we provide specific software solutions across sectors of aerospace, automotive, industrial manufacturing, food &beverage, fashion to name a few. Building newer platforms and innovating better products with this strategic differentiator, Infor is all set to explore opportunities across every geographical region of the world.

Q. How do you account Research & Development in your company?
Research and development is at the heart of our continued successes as we believe constant innovation of products is truly the need of the hour. This is why Infor invests $300m annually on the research and development of products, as we closely watch and understand the most pressing needs of our customers. To cater to the R&D needs we havedeveloped a design team in our new head office in New York City, so they can work directly for our President responsible for products.

India being one of the most focused markets contributing to the growth of Infor, we have our largest R&D center at Hyderabad. The India centre currently has over 1000 employees that includes R&D services & support, and One of the significant developments includes over 10 million hours of engineering contributed into creating Infor 10x -the new suite which marks a major step forward in achieving the company’s vision, uniting a multi-purpose middleware platform featuring social, mobile, analytical and cloud capabilities.

Q. What are the key technological trends that are driving ERP software solutions industry?
There are some exciting technology trends which will clearly positively impact manufacturers in the future like enterprise mobilility, cloud computing, big data and in memory computing. But today Indian manufacturers have more pressing requirements and need Infor’s help to get onto modern platforms in order to embrace the changes that are on the horizon. Indian manufacturers need to go toward the next move rather than continuing with old customised solutions adapted through years that prevent them from application upgrade. At Infor we hold the key. We offer an unbreakable architecture based on a loosely coupled integration environment together with purpose built software which boasts micro vertical industry functionality (containing all of those customisations that had to be built all those years ago). We also have prebuilt Business Intelligence and analytics pre-designed for each user (with a highly desirable user interface that promotes collaboration akin to people sharing everyday stories on Twitter and Facebook). This is the most exciting technology trend – the one of modernization. This will open the doors and allow companies to embrace the pace of change which is now surrounding everybody.