Top four new features in CloudSuite Food & Beverage: April update

Consumers are reeling from escalating food prices, and producers are feeling the pressure as they grapple with rising costs, labor shortages, new regulations, and supply chain interruptions, all of which are affecting their operational strategies and financial performance. At Infor®, our mission is to empower food and beverage manufacturers with technology to stay flexible, enabling them to tackle these challenges and prepare for future ones. Last April, we unveiled numerous new features in our CloudSuite™ Food & Beverage to meet the needs of our customers. Here are the top picks:

1. Generative AI (GenAI): GenAI is an opportunity to unburden your workforce from mundane tasks, letting them focus on value-added activities to speed innovation and time to value. We have built GenAI into our business application processes, making it a natural part of how people work, empowering users with:

• Automated product description authoring and translations: A well-written description can influence whether a customer will buy a product. However, generating product descriptions for e-commerce platforms, catalogs, and websites can be time-consuming and costly to translate—especially if selling into multiple countries. Infor GenAI simplifies this process by automatically generating product descriptions and language translations using the information available in CloudSuite Food & Beverage. Users simply select an item and click the "create description" button to generate suggested text and its corresponding translation, with the flexibility to modify or discard as desired.
• Automated project brief creation: Obtaining buy-in and resources for product development typically requires a well-structured strategy brief. Infor GenAI automates the generation of project briefs by gathering relevant information instantaneously, helping to accelerate individual productivity and innovation.

2. Tools to simplify sustainability and ESG compliance: The food and beverage industry faces increasing pressure from internal and external stakeholders to report on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) activities. The biggest pressure is from new regulations like the SEC Climate Disclosure recently passed in the US and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in the EU. To support these and other regulations, our platform now offers:

• ESG Reporting: Lack of data and manual processes make ESG reporting difficult and resource intensive. To help manage this, CloudSuite Food & Beverage now includes ESG Reporting. Housed within its industry analytics, ESG Reporting offers energy dashboards that enable the quick generation of audit-ready graphical metrics. Built-in templates based on commonly used ESG reporting frameworks automatically populate the tool with the necessary requirements. Leveraging the Data Fabric, Industry Analytics breaks down data silos and collects environmental data from transactional systems, making environmental metrics just a few clicks away.
• Packaging composition in PLM for Process: Now you can automatically generate a list of packaging components to gain crucial insights on associated product carbon footprint (PCF) and food contact information. Using product and packaging level data from suppliers, offers you the ability to view the material type and report CO2e based on quantified weights from unit to pallet level.

3. New finance and shared services capabilities: Infor’s new capabilities help companies embed acquisitions quickly, harmonize processes, and get better insights into performance. These include:

• Improved supplier invoice processing: With a modern and automated solution directly integrated into the core system, it eliminates the need for third-party integrations. This new capability simplifies accounts payable (AP) processing and helps increase efficiency with features such as automated invoice recognition, exception handling, and real-time tracking.
• Easy management of multiple legal entities: Enhance efficiency by managing multiple legal entities under one shared service team. Automatic job execution across daily operations reduces manual workload and can ensure optimal resource utilization when managing cross-entity operations.

4. Improved user experiences tailored for food and beverage professionals: Experience a refreshed UI design that improves readability and data visibility, enhancing the overall user experience. This update also introduces three new customizable workspaces for purchasing managers, AP controllers, and customer service representatives, streamlining their workflow by making the necessary information readily available upon login. With the new Experience Designer tool, users can create persona-based applications without coding using ready-to-go applications. Additionally, the Inventory Planning Workbench features new UI and capabilities, such as a new graph engine for better visual inventory management and API-driven list views, streamlining workflow and helping to improve productivity across the board.

These updates are designed to empower food and beverage manufacturers to meet the industry's modern challenges head-on. By incorporating cutting-edge GenAI technologies and enhancing capabilities for sustainability reporting, Infor is helping organizations pivot towards a more efficient, sustainable, and tech-forward business model.

Read how Infor helped Ruiz Food Products modernize its processes with Infor CloudSuite Food and Beverage.

Ready to explore how these updates can transform your food and beverage operations?

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