Your customers rely on you for the ingredients they need to produce some of the world's best-known food and beverage brands. Because the success of your customers depends on innovation and your ability to deliver the exact product they ordered, your business needs to be a leader in agility and continuous improvement.

Want to learn more about what drives formula agility for food ingredients and how you can maintain operational efficiency while optimizing your formulas?

This latest release of M3 creates a great option for Infor customers on older ERPs to move to the most powerful
solution for Process Manufacturers. With the flexibility of deploying on-premise, or in the cloud, Infor M3 can meet
the needs of nearly any size process-manufacturing customer. Infor Consulting Services is available to help make
your migration fast and economical, while also assisting you in minimizing or even eliminating any customizations
you may have had in your older solutions. If your current ERP appears to be past its shelf life, now is the time to investigate all that M3 can provide for you.

By Greg Kefer, VP marketing, Infor

OK, I realize the headline is a bit loaded, but I got inspired after coming across a market study by Geodis that found only 6% of companies claim to have “full visibility” across their supply chains. This mirrors other studies that point to a consensus that while visibility is universally desired, few companies have it completely figured out.

Part of the challenge is defining what supply chain visibility actually is. According to Gartner, it has more than 100 software vendors on its radar that claim to have some kind of supply chain visibility offering, which means visibility into a distribution center, or plan, or plant, or region, or transport mode, or some performance KPIs would count.

Some companies have figured out visibility, and are driving tens of millions of dollars in value. But a lot of companies are on a long journey to achieve a vision. The complexities of any global supply chain are daunting, but the cost of doing nothing is too great to ignore. You cannot compete if you operate in the dark.

By Doug Tiffan, Chief Merchant at Infor Retail

Infor is on a mission to deliver on the rising expectations of everyone who touches retail, with modern software solutions that give retailers the power to perpetually reinvent themselves, and the customer experience. We’ve worked with more than 1,700 customers in 67 countries to change the way retail runs in grocery, chain drugstores, fashion, luxury goods, restaurants, and hardlines—empowering our partners to monitor the entirety of their retail processes from concept to consumer.

Read Infor's top 5 takeaways from Retail's big show. Have questions? Reach out to ICCG for answers.

The future looks bright for manufacturing. In the latest Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey from the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), manufacturers’ optimism has risen substantially; almost 95% of respondents say they are positive about their own company’s outlook. This optimism is reflected in the UK, as well, with the EEF forecasting 1.4% growth in UK manufacturing in 2018.

Commodity prices have been driven down by a number of factors in recent years, including currency fluctuations, lower oil prices, and the traditional forces of supply and demand. In an unpredictable food & beverage industry environment like this, least cost formulation becomes an essential, ongoing process, not a one-time calculation.

Read these four ways to use least cost formulation.