Even the best innovators have notorious flops: New Coke^®, Apple^® Newton, Microsoft^® Zune, LifeSavers^® Soda, and Harley-Davidson^® Perfume are a few notable examples. Some companies can overcome blunders because their sheer size makes them unstoppable market forces. But for others, even a single mishandled launch can threaten company-wide failure.

The risks are even greater for process manufacturers who must continually innovate with new and iterative products to excite customers and generate new revenue. But the path to profitable innovation is paved with challenges: tighter launch windows, fickle B2C and B2B customers, volatile market swings, and increasing demand for unique, customized products.

An uphill battle

Product development is fundamentally more difficult in process industries. For too many companies, years of internal research and testing lead to product launches that meet with lukewarm success-and negligible profits.

Retailers have already progressed from single channel to multi-channel, and now they’re focused on omni-channel. Omni-channel, however, is often implemented as an integration between disparate systems— leaving data silos in place and creating a rigid and fragile system. While integrating existing POS, e-commerce, and distributed order management systems can help you achieve an omni-channel experience, it will be expensive and tedious to maintain in the long-term. Here's a different approach, which we call Converged Commerce.

Retail software hasn’t seen a large-scale, industry-changing new platform contender enter the ring since the 1990s. Since then, the retail landscape has changed dramatically—as have consumer and worker expectations. The old solutions were built before mobile, social, and the concept of omni-channel ever existed. Infor is on a mission to deliver on the rising expectations of everyone who touches retail.

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