Infor’s Cloud Strategy in light of 2022 Market Outlook by Gartner®

Overview

The shift from on-premises to multi-tenant cloud core financials has enabled suite vendors like Infor to deliver new functionality as quickly as our best-of-breed competitors.

Infor CloudSuite customers leverage a single version of our software that is updated monthly and includes end-to-end functionality across the financials value chain. This enables our users to achieve faster time-to-value — the time when a new feature is released and when a user can realize the value provided by that feature — relative to on-premises ERP deployments.

Key Takeaways

“By 2024, 60% of organizations will select integrated financial management capabilities as their preferred approach to process automation”1. We believe Infor can help customers on this value-driven digital transformation journey by delivering a full-suite solution with a customer experience second to none.

What is ERP Consolidation?

ERP consolidation is the process of combining multiple ERP systems (and databases) onto a single ERP platform. At the end of an ERP consolidation, customers can access a single system to manage financial, product, employee, and customer data.

A business may select an existing ERP system for a consolidation or select a brand-new ERP system. Before deciding to stick with their current ERP system, however, many organizations view an ERP consolidation project as a good opportunity to review other options to see if there’s a better fit for their company’s long-term vision.

Additionally, multiple ERP systems can lead to inconsistent — and inaccurate — data and hinder communication and collaboration. A single ERP system means there’s only one single version of the truth. That can lead to lower IT spending and improved efficiency for all parts of the business.

Why Infor?

Financials & Supply Management, the financial ERP at the core of CloudSuite Healthcare, CloudSuite Public Sector, and CloudSuite Corporate, is a proven, ready-to-run cloud service that is purpose-built to scale. CloudSuites offer a rich API architecture with full extensibility and the security of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 cloud, enabling Infor customers to retire point solutions for global ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and other activities.

ERP consolidation presents an opportunity for organizations to redefine and transform their finance organizations. Infor CloudSuites can serve as a catalyst for our customers to expand digitization and leverage the very latest solution functionality.

Infor OS is a key value differentiator for ERP consolidation because with OS, CloudSuite users can leverage best-in-class cloud infrastructure to track and manage data in a single place. OS is designed to bring productivity, business processes, and artificial intelligence (AI) together to offer customers ironclad data security and rich data insights that were never accessible before.

In “Predicts 2022: The Office of Finance Is Consolidating Applications to the ERP Suite1,” Gartner offers its readers four key recommendations to follow when seeking to consolidate financial ERP applications.

1. Avoid an unnecessarily complex financial application portfolio by selecting solutions on the basis of fit-to-function, supported APIs, and integration.
2. Make step changes in organizational planning by evaluating FP&A vendors versus best-in-class operational solutions when requirements beyond FP&A are considered. Select solutions that are best fit to your functional requirements.
3. Streamline end-to-end process automation in service-centric industries by evaluating core financial management applications from a fit-to-function perspective, while giving priority to broader suites when there are advantages that favor operational integration, such as order-to-cash.
4. Reduce headcount needs by investing in cloud finance applications to gain access to AI functionality.

In our opinion, Infor CloudSuites fully meet these requirements and offer customers a best-in-class financial ERP and analytics suite with industry-specific functionality absent in most competitor point solutions.

Gartner reports that “the ERP suite is becoming a future direction for more organizations, considering financial applications along with other disciplines and operational capabilities.1” Indeed, “the pendulum is gradually swinging back from selecting as many end-to-end solutions as possible, including functionalities targeting financial close, financial planning and analysis (FP&A), treasury, billing, as well as other capabilities that extend core financial management capabilities in payables and receivables (Id.)”

Several factors are driving this market shift. Companies are increasingly selecting solutions based on ease-of-use, ease-of-integration, and functionality to extend data fluency beyond the finance organization, to HR and operations.

We believe, Infor’s suite approach can help customers make more timely decisions that lead to improved organization performance all while improving adoption of other software components (including AI and machine learning) over time.

Written by: Jim Perry, Sr. Director, Industry & Solution Strategy

Gartner, Predicts 2022: The Office of Finance Is Consolidating Applications to the ERP Suite , GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.