Stability is important. Hotels, casinos, and resorts have guests they need to serve right now, today. Hospitality software solutions in place help them do that by taking care of the basics: reservations, check-ins, folios and check-outs, along with a staggering variety of in-house services and their associated charges. Essential software like hotel PMS is pretty “sticky” that way; it’s easier to stick to what you’ve got than it is to change. Why fix what isn’t broken?

Here’s the thing. Five years from now – perhaps sooner – the way guests engage with hospitality providers will likely look very different. Innovative solutions and platforms will be necessary to scale to that new paradigm, whatever it may be. So how do hospitality organizations know when it’s time to start planning for that? How do decision-makers know when it’s time to get unstuck? Here are 3 considerations to help answer that question.

As new hospitality technology emerges and as organizations increasingly invest in it, the ways people do their jobs change in response. Most of the time, this means greater efficiency, and a way for teams to concentrate on key tasks while the technology takes care of the necessary minutiae. Some of the time though, the rise of certain technologies can cause some concerns that with certain functionality in place, the human factor will get lost.

Hospitality AI functionality in hotel revenue management and in hotel pricing tools is a case in point. The conversation around automation via algorithms has been too easily positioned with a “versus” between machine learning solutions and professional expertise. Yet, the features of the technology and years of knowledge and experience held by revenue and strategy teams isn’t adversarial. The relationship between them is more about achieving greater focus and clarity. How do science-based algorithms in revenue management and pricing solutions help your organization do that? Let’s look at some key points.

Partnership offers Infor M3, CSI, and LN customers a solution to accelerate and capture data with intelligent document processing solutions to drive productivity.

Inforum, Infor’s flagship event for customers, partners, and special guests, is being reimagined as a digital experience rather than the traditional in-person conference for this year. It’s scheduled for Sept 15-16 with a mix of on-demand and live sessions that includes customer stories, networking opportunities, product roadmaps, and industry insights.

The theme of “Unprecedented Challenges. Real Opportunities” encapsulates the premise that will be showcased through the event: Despite the extraordinary circumstances individuals and businesses are facing today, the future holds opportunities. Technology will be a catalyst for recovery and reimagining. Attending Inforum will help your enterprise prepare for the next normal. Supply chain planning, facility maintenance, team collaboration, direct distribution to customers, contactless hospitality, digital retail, niche manufacturing, and patient-centered healthcare are among the hot topics coming up.

Learn more about this digital event.

Dear frustrated retailer:

Are you responsible for the success of your company’s retail business from sales, margin, and inventory levels to overall customer satisfaction? If so, what happens when a valuable customer tries to make a purchase from one of your stores or online but is disappointed when there is no inventory? Odds are great you won’t get them back. Out of stocks are a huge problem for your financial bottom line.

What happens when you have excess inventory in the wrong products, wrong locations, or at the wrong time, leading to disappointed customers? You might not be back. Slow moving, stagnant inventory stranded in various locations throughout your supply chain is a tremendous problem for your financial bottom line—and your career.

Your greatest challenge is balancing the need to satisfy customers with your business’ profitability and
growth. Customer loyalty is finicky. They demand inventory when they want it, where they want, and
have a myriad of options on their smartphone to change brands, retailers, locations, and delivery
method. In this new age of retail, you can’t afford to lose a customer to your competition. At the same
time, you can’t load up every location/channel with an infinite amount of inventory in hopes of satisfying every customer’s purchase

Infor is focused on productivity improvements and outcomes-based delivery of projects as the keys to ERP technology success.

To enhance productivity, Infor wants to make it easier for customers to move to its CloudSuite systems, a cloud-based ERP, and wants those systems to be embedded with intelligent ERP technologies such as business analytics, as well as AI, machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA).

"We're constantly looking at ways for our software to bring value to your organization," Infor CEO Kevin Samuelson said during Inforum 2019's opening keynote.

There is interest in intelligent ERP, but some customers and analysts believe it's too early to tell if it will be widely adopted in applications.

Digital transformation is on the agendas of virtually all corporations today. It has risen to the top of strategic plans and has become the focus of businesses around the globe. So great an industry evolution, IDC indicates spending on technologies and services that enable the digital transformation of businesses will hit $1.97 trillion in 2022.

Distribution business trends for 2019, the year of moving strategically.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a lot of people talking. The fact that those people no longer hail primarily from the world of science fiction is representative of just how far the ideas driving this technology have come. AI has entered the mainstream, and it has the technology world buzzing with excitement. The potential applications of AI are vast and varied. And in truth, that is where the real excitement lies—in finding out just how far we can take AI, and in turn, how far it can take us.

Kelly Squizzero, Infor’s Director, Industry & Solution Strategy, points to five key business trends that are shaping distribution business in 2019.

Could AI solve that problem? Speed that process? Five important things you should ask to unearth AI opportunities in your organization.This article by Kevin Casey at the Enterprisers Project which is a community of CIOs discussing the future of business and IT, provides actionable insights on how IT and business leaders can think clearly about where AI might be a good fit. 

Start by putting the infrastructure in place to support a new way of thinking.