As the industrial landscape continues to evolve at an accelerated pace, manufacturers face increasing pressure to remain competitive, cut costs, and respond to shifting customer demands. A key enabler of success is leveraging the right technology—tools that not only streamline operations but also unlock new opportunities for growth and innovation. Infor OS, a transformative platform that is reshaping the future of industrial manufacturing.

Infor OS is a comprehensive cloud-based platform designed to integrate various business processes and provide manufacturers with the tools they need to enhance efficiency, innovation, and flexibility. By combining cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things, and data analytics, Infor OS empowers manufacturers to stay ahead of the curve and drive their businesses into the future.

What is Infor OS?

Infor OS is an enterprise-grade platform built specifically for the modern, digital-first world. It acts as the backbone of Infor’s cloud-based enterprise resource planning solutions, connecting disparate systems, applications, and data sources within a unified ecosystem. Infor OS integrates seamlessly with other Infor software, enabling manufacturers to streamline operations, reduce silos, and improve real-time decision-making.

The platform provides a range of features that help manufacturers optimize their operations:

Data Integration & Connectivity: Infor OS connects all facets of the manufacturing business, enabling seamless communication and data flow across systems. This means better collaboration, smoother workflows, and reduced time spent on manual data entry.

Cloud-Native Architecture: Being cloud-based, Infor OS offers unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and security. Manufacturers can access the platform from anywhere, on any device, ensuring that teams are always connected and in control.

Advanced Analytics & AI: Infor OS leverages powerful AI and machine learning capabilities to analyze massive amounts of data, providing manufacturers with actionable insights. This enables predictive maintenance, demand forecasting, and other data-driven decision-making processes that can dramatically improve operational efficiency.

A New Era of Efficiency

The hallmark of Infor OS lies in its ability to optimize processes and reduce inefficiencies at every stage of production. By centralizing data and automating repetitive tasks, manufacturers can focus on value-added activities rather than getting bogged down by manual work.

1. Streamlined Operations

Infor OS enables end-to-end visibility into operations, giving manufacturers real-time access to critical data, production schedules, and inventory levels. This transparency allows companies to monitor their processes continuously, identify bottlenecks, and take corrective actions promptly.

2. Improved Collaboration

In traditional manufacturing environments, departments often work in silos, leading to communication breakdowns and delayed decision-making. Infor OS breaks down these barriers by connecting various functions within the business, ensuring that every department—from sales to procurement to production—has access to the same real-time data.

3. Reduced Downtime and Maintenance Costs

Infor OS uses AI-powered predictive maintenance tools to monitor machinery in real time. By analyzing sensor data from IoT-enabled equipment, the platform can predict when a machine is likely to fail and recommend timely interventions. This helps manufacturers reduce unplanned downtime, extend the lifespan of their equipment, and lower maintenance costs.

Fostering Innovation in Manufacturing

Beyond just optimizing existing processes, Infor OS paves the way for true innovation in the manufacturing sector. By providing manufacturers with advanced analytics, automation capabilities, and new digital tools, Infor OS helps businesses unlock their creative potential and transform their operations.

1. Smarter Product Development

Infor OS enhances the ability to design and manufacture products that meet customer demands more effectively. With better data insights, manufacturers can identify trends, gauge customer preferences, and develop smarter products that are aligned with market needs. This accelerates the product lifecycle and allows for quicker go-to-market times.

2. Agility and Flexibility

One of the key benefits of cloud-native platforms like Infor OS is the level of flexibility they offer. Manufacturers can quickly adapt to changing market conditions, whether it's scaling operations up or down, responding to supply chain disruptions, or experimenting with new production methods. This level of agility is crucial for staying competitive in the fast-paced industrial world.

3. Sustainability Initiatives

In a world where sustainability is becoming increasingly important, Infor OS enables manufacturers to track their environmental impact and optimize resource usage. By leveraging data analytics and AI, manufacturers can better understand energy consumption patterns, minimize waste, and make environmentally conscious decisions that contribute to a greener future.

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In the ever-evolving manufacturing realm, few sectors witness transformations as swift and constant. The perpetual evolution of consumer preferences shapes the landscape, the consistent disruption brought by innovative technologies, fluctuating regulatory frameworks, and the regular transformation of business models. Adapting to these unceasing shifts in the market has become necessary, requiring organizations to embody a heightened sense of agility.

Andrew Kinder, Senior Vice President of Industry Strategy with our partner, Infor, recently described how we find ourselves amidst the most volatile and uncertain period in recent memory. In this environment of compounded uncertainty, agility is not just an ideal trait but an absolute imperative for maintaining competitiveness.

As the manufacturing world continues to evolve to meet new challenges, there’s a step-change in innovation for the products and services that are delivered and supported. Many industry insiders are expressing the need for a focus on driving sustainable (and profitable) business growth. Deloitte suggests digital investment and supply chain resilience as the key pillars. Partnerships are also increasingly important to achieving sustainable business growth, whether that’s upstream or downstream within your supply chain or enabling partners such as application and technology providers.

In all of those partnering scenarios, it’s important to have a common understanding of your desired outcomes, so you can ensure you’re all speaking the same language, which helps shorten the time to value. Manufacturing is shifting towards industry-specific applications and these applications are now nearly always delivered in the cloud to maximize adoption, flexibility, availability, and security, as well as reducing through-life cost of ownership. In fact, Gartner forecasts end-user public cloud spending to grow by 18% through 2021.

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.

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.

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?

Modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are helping businesses around the globe—including your competitors—revolutionize their operations. Manufacturing companies of all sizes are adopting technology that is industry-specific and 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.

Traditionally, almost all business intelligence and analytics solutions were designed as general-purpose platforms or desktop tools suitable for any industry, department, or use case. That does mean, of course, that the burden of developing data models, data pipelines, dashboards, and reports falls to the customer. They effectively start with a 'blank sheet of paper,' which, in theory, can be developed to fit the organization's exact needs. However, the reality is that the organization may not have either the skills, resources, or time to develop an analytics solution that quickly meets business requirements.

The answer to avoiding this overhead of entirely homegrown analytics is to use a modern analytic application that can deliver ready-to-use analytics, right "out-of-the-box." Deployment and adoption of these analytic applications are accelerated because of built-in content developed by industry domain experts that understand the industries, roles, data, business applications, and specific analytics required by typical business user personas. A significant amount of development time can be saved because this domain-expertise-driven content can replace typical internal development processes.

Automotive manufacturers and their suppliers continue to increase their collaboration in various ways, whether this be through robotic process automation (RPA), data collection and exchange, or other methods that provide insights for scalability. With true, multi-enterprise collaboration, there are cross-training opportunities to convey customer needs and preferences for product innovation, giving manufacturers the ability to make rapid adjustments in real time. Collaborative behavior makes this happen, and it all starts with transparency.

However, building real trust, collaboration, and transparency goes beyond using a specific technology or workflow. At its core, this is about changing the culture of automotive OEMs and throughout their suppliers at every tier. Automotive companies who are true leaders in the industry consider the health of the entire supply network, not just their immediate interests. Making this change—as with almost all substantive transformations—requires change be from the top executive level down.