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.

Even when your warehouse operations seem to be running smoothly, there is always room for improvement and a need to stay up to date with innovation. While steps are taken to keep warehouse operations at peak performance, when fulfilment times and levels are jeopardized, it’s still up to you and your team to race to recover, to ensure actions to get back on track are taken correctly so that product can make its way out the door, and time is always working against you.

If your organization previously reviewed and dismissed the value of moving your warehouse management system (WMS) to the cloud, it’s time to reevaluate. Decisions that seemed to make sense last year or even last quarter, likely look very different with new challenges emerging over the past several months. By empowering critical systems like a WMS with cloud capabilities, your organization can scale quickly, maximize productivity, and minimize outages and downtime to prevent bringing the company’s mission-critical operations to its knees.

Asset performance is key for food and beverage processors to reliably produce safe food at the lowest cost. This goes beyond only having the equipment available. Asset performance is one of three variables used to calculate the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)—the other two variables are availability and quality. In food and beverage processing, quality is primarily about food safety, which is non-negotiable. Studies show that a food safety issue leading to a recall in average costs $10 million. The associated brand damage can be unmeasurable.

The state of equipment and the behaviour of workers have a big impact on food safety. Eliminating food safety risks and risks to workers are the primary responsibilities of any food processing company. Numerous food safety issues caused by contaminations with extraneous material like metal coming from broken filling equipment, or grease or detergent remnants are reported to the FDA and RASFF every year. Cross contamination, pathogens, and faulty labeling are other possible reasons why food and beverage manufacturers must recall products

Know you want to transform but don't know where to start? Want to gain $9-12 for every dollar you spend? Read on to find out why starting with your people is the best first step to prioritizing digital transformation projects.

Digital transformation is at the top of the to-do lists of most companies, but one topic that is often missing from a discussion on digital transformation is which areas to prioritize. Most businesses can’t afford to completely overhaul a core function of the enterprise top to bottom, along with the technology that supports it, at any one time. Instead, they’ll target specific areas for transformation. That approach minimizes disruption to the business, keeps costs manageable, and helps the business apply lessons learned to future transformation projects. The question, though, is which areas to target first?

1. Are we organizationally ready for significant change?

Organizations are only as good as their people, and manufacturers must look carefully at whether they have the right people and culture to support a different way of doing things. It is the people who will be responsible for implementing change, and they should be ready, committed, and on board with any type of transformation plan.

An organization’s culture can make or break a digital transformation project and “organizational change management” is one of the key components of such a project. Organizations should aim for an inclusive culture where people feel like they are key contributors to the company’s future success.

To achieve this, management teams should encourage a culture of openness to help employees step forward with their ideas. All change, and all transformation, starts with an idea – so it’s important for people to feel empowered to put their ideas out in the open.

With spring just around the corner and rising hope that the vaccination rollout will eventually bring some relief to restrictions, it is time to start thinking about how the world of work should move forward. While the pandemic forced us to adopt new ways of working, we have learned some valuable lessons in the last year that should not be quickly forgotten. In fact, some of these new strategies should continue long after the crisis subsides as we have come to the realization that the workforce, the workplace and work itself will never be the same. Here are three concepts to consider as you plan for the future.

When every transaction counts more so than ever before in restaurants and food services, forward-thinking strategies around restaurant menu management have become more important than ever before. Central to that is how much leading organizations have risen to the occasion to streamline the way they manage they their offering and push the newest versions of menus to the point of sale, unified across locations and concepts.

Restaurants and managed food services rely on current data and the technology needed to find useful narratives about how to enhance performance and maximize returns, specifically at the menu item level. How does that work? What role does restaurant POS play in that process? Let’s take a look.

Competitive supply chains must enable a new level of coordinated performance that creates a high-fidelity picture of in-process flows across your extended network. Building the continuous supply chain supports contextual deviations, conveys alerts and drives continuous planning via sense & respond capabilities.

Optimizing multi-party business processes

Supply chains are complex networks where over 80% of the data and processes sits within partner systems. To see and act on the latest picture of your supply chain, your company needs that data from each of your partners, but the problem is most companies rely solely on an enterprise-centric approach to solve a multi-enterprise problem.

The only way to overcome those limitations is to adopt a "network approach." Connecting all partners to shared processes, data and metrics managed within a single platform creates a single version of truth for all parties. This allows supply chains to eliminate the data silos and inherent latency in order to reduce the root causes of friction, variability and costs in today’s supply chains, both internally and externally.

Put the Power of Infor CloudSuite M3 ERP Solution in Your Pocket

Leveraging Infor CloudSuite M3 ERP Solution and Infor Factory Track to Increase efficiencies in your warehouse and shop floor

Join ICCG as we present a 30-minute Master Class … where you will have the opportunity to see a demo of Infor Factory Track in action. You’ll gain valuable insight from our work with multiple customers and we are ready to share our knowledge with you.

Maybe you are curious on what it takes to implement, administrate functions, or compare Lawson Warehouse Mobility, and Infor Factory Track. Bring your questions because now is the time to implement this Cloud-Based WMS and shop floor tool and we would like to help you get there!