Infor delivers multi-tenant ERP for manufacturing verticals

Infor, the provider of business application software serving more than 73,000 customers, has announced an enhanced version of Infor LN, delivering deeper vertical and micro-vertical functionality within manufacturing, with the goal of helping better align customers with business objectives and reducing the need for costly customisation.

Infor LN is the enterprise backbone for automotive, aerospace & defence, high tech and industrial manufacturing industries and is now multi-tenant enabled to support the industry specific needs of Infor CloudSuites. Infor believes that no two clouds are alike, so the latest iteration of Infor LN utilises a tailored approach, helping customers focus on the unique manufacturing needs of their organisation.

This update of Infor LN was designed with customer feedback in mind and provides functional enhancements to order management, invoicing, procurement, warehouse management, project planning and quality management. Infor LN is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that is aimed at managing everything from design to delivery, with a specialised out-of-the-box approach that is customised for a specific industry or micro-vertical. Infor LN is available to customers via a cloud-hosted or on-premise deployment to better meet individual business requirements. The revamped user experience is designed by Hook & Loop, Infor's in-house creative agency.

Key Features:

• Core ERP Upgrades – The key manufacturing update allows for the handling of quarantine inventory (rejected items), first article inspections and quality tracking via the product serial code. The procurement process features a new requisition workbench, designed with Hook & Loop, to help buyers make more informed vendor selections and speed up the requisition request process. The credit and rebill features are intended to reduce the manual process of billing, while segment accounting allows customers to benefit from the simplicity of a single company ledger. Document management such as invoices and order acknowledgements can now be automatically emailed directly to customers and suppliers, which can help reduce staffing requirements.

• Industry Specific Enhancements – For all applicable micro-verticals, specific enhancements have been added to the product to help tailor functionality to specified needs of the industry. For manufacturers, Infor LN now contains the product configuration management (PCM) tool, which enables graphical product configuration. The after-market service support function has also been revised to boost planning, pricing and handling of customer owned parts. Manufacturing customers can also benefit from new customer furnished materials. In conjunction with newly enhanced auditing and override measures, Infor LN now provides better control to users. For automotive customers, specific quality management procedures are now built-in to support materials pricing.

• Revamped User Experience – The latest iteration of Infor LN provides significant upgrades to the user experience (UX). Infor LN now leverages HTML 5 in conjunction with Infor Ming.le, a comprehensive platform for social business collaboration. The pairing of an enhanced UX and more intuitive workflows can help to alleviate many day-to-day challenges and help support better decision-making. Users gain access to a singular view of the underlying data and various in-context analytics capabilities, such as analytics for the contract manager, project manager and quality manager, to further process these insights.

"Infor's investments are essential to the transition manufacturers should make in modernising their applications and their enterprise architecture," said Kimberly Knickle, Practice Director and Robert Parker, Group Vice President, International Data Corporation (IDC).

Edward Talerico, industry director, Infor, added: "Customers come to us with specific micro-verticals needs, seeking to improve operations and while many challenges are similar, they do not want to customise our software to meet their industry specific requirements. That is why the latest version of Infor LN has been optimised to offer a tailored approach for enhancing operational efficiency for specific discrete manufacturers. Infor is carefully providing an approach designed to help meet the demands of the particular micro-vertical industries, regardless of size or even budget."