Infor prioritizes the safety of its customers and their employees. The Infor Workforce Management (WFM) team believes the strength of an organization is its people, and to keep businesses healthy depends on keeping employees healthy and safe. We are here to help, with information about relevant features and functionality that can help your organization respond to COVID-19 and evolve in the new normal.

Contact Tracing
Infor WFM includes configurable Work Detail Filters on both the Daily Timesheet and Supervisor Approval Worksheet. When an employee is identified as exposed to the COVID-19 virus, enabling these filters can help quickly find other employees who worked on the same team or the same department at the same time as that person.

Paid Sick
You can track COVID-19-related paid sick time separately from your existing sick policies. Define a special COVID paid sick time balance and track its usage on employee timesheets by defining a unique time code.

Dedicated to safeguarding your information

To protect the privacy of its customers and the safety of their information, Infor® maintains high standards of data security. Infor Birst® relies upon state-of-the-art and secure data centers, enforces strict internal product controls, and regularly audits its policies and procedures using third-party auditors.

The following sections of this white paper cover the key areas of Birst security in detail, including physical security, system security, operational security, reliability, and application and data security.

The key tenets of Infor Birst’s security initiatives are:

• Security is designed from the ground up in the application, network, hardware, and operational procedures.
• Birst is SOC 2 Type 2 audited, HIPAA/HITECH attested, and ISO-27001:2013 certified.
• Modern Tier-4 data centers that are SOC 2 Type 2 audited and are ISO 27001 certified or follow ISO 27001 policies.
• Infor’s global GDPR privacy program is independently validated by TRUSTe.
• Adherence to security best practices for code development, testing, and operations is followed.
• Regular external review of the policies and procedures for Birst security and operations is conducted.
• Regular penetration and vulnerability testing by third parties is completed.
• Birst personnel maintain security and privacy certifications.

When extreme levels of disruption occur, supply chains immediately launch a survival strategy that tends be focused solely on the enterprise, leaving upstream and downstream trading partners to fend for themselves. Whether scrambling to enable remote work opportunities, implement flexible or staggered labor scheduling, or launch multiple capital preservation strategies, organizations have begun employing a variety of strategies to protect their supply chains and weather the storm.

To ensure the health of the overall supply chain network, the urgency to digitize processes and documents that allow both data and capital to be unlocked has become more prevalent than ever—particularly when a complex number of parties, systems, and document across geographical regions and time zones are involved.

For years, digitization has been considered an optional strategy by many companies, thus resulting in static and disconnected buyer-supplier collaboration points across supply chains. For many organizations, processes continue to be highly manual across fragmented systems, resulting in inefficient, error prone workflows.

Reliance upon Excel®, email, and phone calls remains common across a staggeringly significant amount of business, thereby resulting in delays, non-compliance, and friction between buyer and seller. Time and resources lost synchronizing simple concepts like purchase order confirmations, negotiation, documentary compliance, and invoice approvals cripples flexibility and agility, all while locking up millions, if not billions in working capital.

Anywhere paper or manual processes exist a lack of visibility follows, leaving missed opportunities to harness real-time supply chain data that optimizes decisions and mitigate risks.

When it comes to ensuring supply chain health, there are three key approaches your organization can do to improve processes and build resiliency into your network. Not only will this help you minimize uncertainty during times of disruption, it will also help streamline improvements during times of prosperity.

Supply chain essential #1: Digital documents, data, and settlements

Companies must focus on network connectivity and process automation to drive agility and responsiveness while continually investing in predictive and proactive sense and respond capabilities.

Economic sustainability includes multiple key components starting with digital connectivity and collaboration as the digitization of documents and workflows enables speed and agility. Multi-enterprise collaboration enables strategic programs such as providing suppliers access to capital through a multi-bank network. This helps the entire supply chain endure dynamic liquidity shortages that often stem from a crisis and a period of economic recovery.

The hospitality and gaming industries require specific functionality when it comes to sales and catering, and event management. The same goes for family entertainment centers like bowling centers, laser-tag spaces, and others.

What are those factors? What should organizations in these sectors look for in software solutions to manage these important aspects of their business. The cloud has emerged as a proven alternative to the legacy systems used by the hotel industry.  One by one and group by group, independent hotels and chains alike, are seeking out a cloud-based platform to provide integrated solutions for their hospitality management needs. 

Beyond cloud technology, let’s look at some other event sales and catering software characteristics that contribute to the success of hotel and casinos as legacy systems are beginning to be phased out.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private sector arm, set out to provide relief to businesses in emerging regions as the pandemic roiled global markets. Stephanie von Friedeburg, MD and COO of the IFC, looks back on the year in a recent podcast where she reflects the following:

“There's been a substantive hit on supply chains, trade shocks. And so our trade finance business, which has always been a core of our business, has grown very substantially. And we've seen it in the poorest countries in particular, where we know that we need to continue to keep trade flowing. So we've seen an increase in trade finance in that relief piece. We've also seen many of our existing clients needing working capital and needing liquidity, and we believe it was important for us when we typically don't do a lot of liquidity or working capital, but important for us to step in and help our existing clients to withstand the crisis, keep them solvent so that when we come out of the crisis, we can rebuild faster and better.”

Overcoming (old and new) challenges

Warehouses and distribution centers can face challenges that impact everything from inventory management to operational strategy to employee management and more. Some of these challenges are the result of technologies that place new pressures on organizations that aren’t yet equipped to handle them. Some of these pressures are a direct result of how authorities, people, and businesses were forced to adjust to 2020’s global pandemic. Yet, with every challenge also comes opportunity. Below are some of the major challenges that are facing organizations today—and how they can be turned into opportunities.

Pick optimization

Many organizations lack the level of item master data needed for optimal cartonization and ideal facility layout. Without the proper item and location slotting (based on concepts such as seasonality, promotional activities, and sales projections), poor inventory placement across the warehouse often results in increased costs and reduced productivity. Much of that lost time and effort, however, can be reclaimed when organizations implement smarter management of where inventory is kept in a warehouse or distribution center by improving their slotting processes. In addition, enhanced slotting can even enable the strategic selection of optimized picking processes, such as pick to pass, batch picking, pick to light, sorting, voice picking, and more to increase volume and throughput.

Improve business productivity and agility

Modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are helping businesses around the globe—including your competitors—revolutionize their operations. Distributors of all sizes are adopting technology that is designed to better manage business processes on an integrated and real-time basis. Technologically advanced ERP systems are an investment in your company’s operations, efficiency, intelligence, and productivity. Every feature of a modern ERP system ultimately ties back to these improvements, which enable your organization to become more productive, more competitive, and better positioned to meet your customers’ needs.

As these business systems evolved, they met the needs of their times, but their functionality was directly limited by the available technology. Today’s ERP systems might be better called digital operations platforms (DOP) to reflect their agile, artificial intelligence (AI)-based, and experience-driven nature, as well as the critical role they play in cloud-based, digital businesses.

Technology advances have transformed what an ERP (aka DOP) can do for your organization. Modern ERP systems provide a live view into what is happening and how it impacts your business today, as well as in the months and years to come. This helps you to focus on the future instead of the past.