Infor unveils industry-specific solutions to transform supply chain management

Today, resilient and agile supply chains are essential for controlling costs and ensuring customer satisfaction. According to a 2023 report from Deloitte, 69% of supply chain leaders prioritize these goals. But many organizations rely on generic solutions that fail to address industry-specific needs, resulting in costly, complex integrations and disconnected, inefficient supply chains. For instance:

• Integrated healthcare delivery networks of hospitals, surgery centers, clinics, and physician offices don’t have right-sized, purpose-built warehouse management solutions embedded in their ERP. Instead, they are forced to buy costly third-party solutions that deliver more than they need, and the integration of these solutions inhibits the ERP from staying as the single financial record required for better decision-making.
• Distributors manage high sales volumes and demand that can change in an instant. Most solutions today cannot support real-time forecasting at scale. Instead, data is sent in batches, risking missed time-sensitive insights that could affect forecasting accuracy.
• Food and beverage manufacturers have stringent retail service level agreements. Any variation risks financial penalties or being delisted as a supplier. Without a tightly integrated supply chain and ERP, planners must initiate forecast uploads or manually enter data into the ERP, creating opportunities for human error and potentially impacting the ability to meet demand and minimize food waste.
• Discrete manufacturers often operate highly distributed supply chains across multiple global locations. To be competitive, they must ensure materials and products are available to meet demand and purchase commitments. Discrepancies can lead to delays, increased costs, and poor customer satisfaction. They need real-time global visibility to quickly respond to market changes.

Infor’s supply chain management enhancements

Unlike other vendors, Infor supply chain management solutions have industry-specific requirements and use our deep industry knowledge to enable distinct business processes and outcomes. By embedding purpose-built supply chain management capabilities with our industry-specific CloudSuite ERP offerings, we unlock and unify data, reduce manual intervention, and speed time to value for our customers.

Our new capabilities include:

Healthcare

1. Reduce disruption to patient care with Distribution Management

Today, we are announcing Distribution Management, a purpose-built solution embedding essential inventory control and distribution management functionality into CloudSuites for service industries—particularly Healthcare. This multi-phase project expands Infor ERP capabilities and eliminates the need for costly standalone warehouse management solutions. Distribution Management supports integrated healthcare delivery networks (IDN) to manage inventory and warehousing across multiple locations like internal and external storerooms, ambulatory surgery centers, clinics, and physicians’ offices.

Right sized for healthcare warehousing operations to deliver products and support organizations within this network, Distribution Management addresses critical business processes related to receiving, storing, picking, and shipping. It ensures customers get a unified and complete supply chain solution from warehouse to delivery, driving continuity of data and insights while reducing licensing and maintenance costs. Unlike other vendors who require expensive licenses and often third-party integrations for healthcare providers who need advanced warehousing, Infor provides these capabilities natively embedded in the ERP. Please note that large healthcare providers can continue to rely on Infor’s Warehouse Management System (WMS) to cater to their broader and deeper needs.

2. Reduce costs and improve patient outcomes with Procedure Supply Planning

Introducing the first and only healthcare ERP in the cloud with embedded procedure supply planning, enabling accurate demand projection for medical procedures. Procedure Supply Planning reduces rescheduling procedures due to stockouts and lowers costs by providing visibility into supply and demand. Procedure Supply Planning helps healthcare organizations improve patient outcomes through proactive identification and response to potential shortages.

It solves the current data silos across hospital systems that result in inaccurate supply-demand projections and costly, avoidable rescheduling of surgeries, impacting the organization’s financial health and the patient experience. It surfaces scheduling and provider preference card data from the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system via Clinical Bridge and combines it with data in CloudSuite Healthcare to enable proactive inventory planning of medical supplies and prevent costly and disruptive rescheduling of surgeries due to supply shortages.

Distribution, Food and Beverage, Fashion, Process and Discrete Manufacturing

1. Infor Introduces its Next Generation Demand Forecasting

Infor’s new Demand Forecasting application brings near real-time data accuracy at scale and installs in minutes. Infor Demand Forecasting has everything you expect, including industry-leading statistical forecasting based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), demand sensing, and the ability to collaborate. It is cloud-native and can integrate with any ERP, but because it’s embedded within our M3 CloudSuite ERPs (Food & Beverage, Fashion, Distribution, Chemical, Manufacturing), it eliminates manual updates and data batching to support near real-time forecasts at scale. For organizations such as distributors with extensive product lines and data this ensures immediate action on demand variations, preventing overstock or stockouts. Its embedded nature makes installations simple, allowing organizations to start forecasting in as little as 30 minutes.

2. Infor Supply Planning

Infor Supply Planning application has two new features:

• Improved network visibility speeds root cause analysis: Infor Supply Planning now graphically maps the entire supply chain from purchasing to manufacturing to sales. Issues are highlighted, eliminating the need to navigate multiple screens, apply filters, and search records. By clicking an alert, the user jumps to an analysis where they can solve the issue.
• Improved decision making via scenario management: Planners can now visually compare different planning scenarios to make more informed decisions. By analyzing factors like cost, profit, capacity, expansion, component availability, and carbon footprint, planners can evaluate the potential consequences of various changes and select the optimal plan. Each scenario can be linked to detailed planning data and, if approved, integrated into the ERP system.

3. Infor WMS introduces AI-driven warehouse management

Warehouses face challenges in inventory accuracy, space optimization, productivity, costs, and scaling operations. These issues largely stem from the time-consuming and error-prone nature of manual data gathering and analysis. To overcome this, we are infusing AI into Infor Warehouse Management System (WMS) to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve decision-making. New use cases based on ML and GenAI include Undersized Location Anomaly Detection, Product Location Recommendations, GenAI Facility Review Report, and GenAI Shift Startup Script, among others.

4. Infor LN CloudSuite ERP now has integrated advanced planning

Discrete manufacturers can use Infor’s built-in enhanced supply chain and planning capabilities to automate and integrate their inventory management, procurement, and productions processes across the supply chain. This reduces manual intervention, errors, operational costs, and minimizes lateness and delays in production. Infor’s new cloud-based advanced planning solution, Planner Plus, is embedded in its LN CloudSuite ERP and focuses on finite planning, dramatically improving customer service. An industrial machinery and equipment manufacturer, for example, leverages advanced planning to better manage customer orders and track progress through the manufacturing, purchasing, distribution, and production cycle. A manufacturer can quickly adapt to the rapidly changing market, identifying and resolving shortages, capacity constraints, and other bottlenecks to establish optimized plans and keep up with competitors.

5. Enhanced supplier collaboration with Enterprise Collaboration Portal

Infor’s online Enterprise Collaboration Portal allows manufacturers to connect with their suppliers and subcontractors to communicate and provide information needed to drive the supply chain. New capabilities include managing changes in subcontractor jobs and improved visibility to track items and materials being delivered against purchase orders. These enhancements deliver supply chain transparency while helping buyers save time on routine tasks.

Learn more:

Read press release: Infor Targets Business Velocity with Added Process Mining, ESG and GenAI Capabilities
Register for Infor’s webcast: Transforming your supply chain from stress to success