As a long-time professional in cloud solutions, I can sometimes be struck by how uniform the information, discussion and debate is about the differences in cloud in the IT industry, whether from journalists, analysts or industry colleagues. Usually speaking in sweeping terms about the cloud and making everything from inaccurate statements to generalizing conclusions based on the cloud description. In this blog post, I want to help you understand the differences in clouds in relation to ERP solutions. It's all about the level of responsibility, agility and security.

Many organizations tend to view warehouse operations as cost centers due to the labor, equipment, and physical inventory. However, with business models rapidly changing through e-commerce, omnichannel, curbside pickup, 3D printing, and more, warehouse operations empower a company to gain a competitive advantage by ensuring customer loyalty and brand excellence stay intact as products enter the last mile.

Common warehousing challenges

Warehouse directors understand the challenges most, if not all, distribution centers manage. These challenges cover a wide range of issues which include picking optimization, inventory management, operational strategy, employee management, returns, and much, much more.

Picking challenges

For example, a large amount of productivity is often lost due to insufficient item master data. Poor inventory placement across the warehouse can result in increased costs and reduced productivity without the correct item and location slotting for concepts such as seasonality, promotional activities, and sales projections.

Furthermore, many companies lack visibility into inventory quantity and location accuracy due to a heavy reliance on spreadsheets, pick sheets, the absence of cycle counts, capacity constraints, or a lack of digital monitoring together. No visibility into inventory quantities or throughput can result in declining fulfillment rates, stockouts & backorders, decreased service levels, and waning customer loyalty and sales opportunities.

Managing global freight and ocean container movement now requires more dedicated insight as companies have expanded internationally. And no event outside of COVID-19 has exposed just how extensive, yet fragile, logistics networks and capacity flows have become over the last several decades.

To adapt, some manufacturers have adopted progressive supply chain approaches that move from "lean models to more flexible ones like "sense and respond." But not all businesses have successfully met the challenges.

Globalization forces supply chains to consider all events, from regional holidays and ocean weather patterns to geo-political turmoil and currency fluctuations. Moreover, 2020 introduced yet another element: navigating a global pandemic.

It’s a moment of enormous opportunity, with Industry 4.0 transforming the way businesses collect, process, and deploy data, and Maintenance 4.0 applying those tools and techniques to revolutionize asset management.

A strategic approach to Asset Performance Management (APM) helps you keep critical equipment and production lines up and running, using the mountains of operational data now available to help you track equipment performance, anticipate the need for maintenance, and prevent breakdowns before they occur. But even in steady economic times, and certainly in the midst of a global pandemic, the decision to embrace the new technology will always be guided by the bottom line: Will the cost of the new system be justified by the efficiencies and cost savings it delivers?

Infor’s Best Practice Guide, “Why your EAM strategy must evolve to increase food safety,” focuses on five specific, tangible benefits of APM, to help you make an informed decision on an approach that will soon be the price of entry for successful business operations in the 21st century.

There has never been a better opportunity for you to embrace technology that drives innovation. Transforming and evolving as an organization is now a requirement to thrive and protect continuity of business. Infor helps Lawson S3 customers drive digital transformation and ensure business continuity with Infor industry CloudSuites. Infor CloudSuite customers leverage improved automation and role-based security to tighten access to sensitive data, scale quickly and efficiently, and harness the power and responsiveness of Infor’s modern system architecture to stay ahead and compete.

Infor CloudSuites are built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the market leader for cloud-based infrastructure as a service and platform as a service for over 10 years. This best-in-class system architecture is purpose-built for innovation, providing you with industry-leading scalability and availability, integrated governance and control, and unparalleled extensibility to democratize data for end users.

Infor CloudSuites, including CloudSuite Healthcare, CloudSuite Corporate, and CloudSuite Public Sector, provide an easy path for Lawson S3 financials and global human resources customers to digitally evolve business operations. CloudSuites deliver industry-specific capabilities without extensive customizations or integrations. Infor’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) competitors struggle to tap into the latest advances in enterprise functionality with as little business disruption and as cost effectively as with our AWS tag team.

Since the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing processes have undergone several revolutions characterized by ever-greater automation. Today, the fourth industrial revolution, known as Industry 4.0, takes advantage of big data and machine learning to drive smart, highly automated processes. A pretty familiar concept.

Less well understood, but equally momentous, has been a parallel evolution in asset maintenance. Maintenance 1.0 relied on highly-trained specialists to visually inspect machinery. Maintenance 2.0 gave humans instrumentation to measure how equipment was running, while Maintenance 3.0 used real-time monitoring to understand the condition of an asset systematically and programmatically. Now with the Internet of Things (IoT) collecting sensor data, Maintenance 4.0 sees that data captured in a data lake repository, and algorithms and analytics applied to better predict when a given asset will fail, and how to correct the problem—preventing a potential food safety issue.