Co-authored by: Ian Rea | Director, Solution Marketing, Industrial Manufacturing
The metal fabrication CIO's path from legacy debt to secure, AI-ready operations
If you run information technology (IT) for a multi-site metal fabrication business, you already know the tension. The board wants a cloud-first, security-hardened stack. The plant floor needs manufacturing execution system (MES), product lifecycle management (PLM) system, and configure, price, quote (CPQ) to talk to each other instead of living in silos. None of it can come at the cost of a missed shipment, because your customers measure delivery in days, not quarters. It's easy to see why so many metal fabrication chief information officers (CIOs) choose stability over the modernization they know they need. That instinct makes sense. But it's worth separating two problems that often get treated as one: the risk of changing systems, and the cost of not changing them. The second one is bigger than it looks, and it's growing.
Why this feels harder than it used to
For many metal fabricators, the challenge isn't a lack of technology. It's the accumulation of decades of technology decisions. Custom integrations built to solve yesterday's problem become barriers to tomorrow's growth. Engineering teams work in one system, production in another, and suppliers in a third. Every change requires manual intervention, and every acquisition or expansion adds another layer of complexity. The result is an environment where maintaining operations consumes more resources than improving them.
Metal fabrication runs on precision, but the systems wrapped around that precision often do not. Design changes do not reach the shop floor in real time. Material grades and dimensional attributes live in spreadsheets instead of the system of record. Each new connection between engineering, production, planning, and suppliers becomes one more thing to maintain the next time a process changes.
A February 2026 Gartner® report on manufacturing CIO challenges names compounded technical debt across IT, operational technology, and engineering technology systems as one of the three biggest headwinds facing manufacturers over the next three years. The same survey found 54% of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders at manufacturing organizations point to the pace of technical debt accumulation as their top challenge, with 48% facing real cost and risk from critical technology dependencies as a result.
Research from Infor™ backs this up: a recent global survey found businesses consistently point to data, integration, and system limitations, not a lack of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, as the real bottleneck to getting value from AI.
Why a generic cloud move usually doesn't fix it
The instinct to just “move it to the cloud” often backfires. Configure-to-order logic that was customized in the old system gets rebuilt as custom code in the new one. Computer-aided design (CAD)-to-production integration stays just as fragile, because the underlying data was never modeled cleanly to begin with. You end up taking on migration risk without getting the agility you were promised.
After years, and often decades, of bespoke customizations and workarounds, teams worry that moving to the cloud means giving up the processes and the control they depend on. The questions surface quickly. Will the new system understand our complexity? Will we lose capabilities we spent years refining? Will our people have to change how they work?
The honest answer is that some things will change. Positioning the business for the future means transforming parts of how it works today. The good news is that transformation is a staged journey, not a single event. Teams need time to learn new processes, adopt new tools, and build confidence in new ways of working. Like any significant change, it can feel exciting and frustrating at once, especially when relearning tasks people could previously do without thinking.
That is also why successful implementations do not end at go-live. Change management, education, and continuous support matter as much as the technology. Infor partners with customers throughout the transformation journey to drive adoption, build confidence, and make sure value continues long after implementation. Learn more about Infor CareFor Managed Services.
A successful cloud transformation is not about recreating every customization from the past. It is about using modern capabilities, proven practices, and industry-specific functionality so the business becomes more agile, scalable, and resilient.
What a fabrication-specific foundation changes
The difference is where you start. Instead of taking a generic cloud platform and customizing it to look like the old system, you start with a foundation built around the realities of industrial manufacturing and metal fabrication.
Capabilities such as dimensional inventory, material pricing, CPQ, and project costing are already part of the platform rather than something your team has to bolt on through customizations. That alone removes much of the complexity and effort that typically drags a migration out.
Native CAD integration closes the gap between engineering and production, ensuring design changes, bill of materials (BOM) updates, and manufacturing requirements flow seamlessly from engineering into the shop floor. Instead of relying on manual workarounds and disconnected systems, engineering and manufacturing can operate from the same source of truth.
Connectivity across PLM, MES, CPQ, and supplier exchange means a new plant, an acquisition, or a new robotics line doesn't require rebuilding the architecture from scratch. The business can scale and adapt without creating another generation of custom integrations that eventually become tomorrow's technical debt.
It is delivered as a secure, multi-tenant cloud service on Amazon Web Services® (AWS®), with governance, compliance, and security designed in from the start. For multi-site manufacturers, that means less time spent managing infrastructure, upgrades, and patches, and more time spent on business value.
Diligence still matters. Disaster recovery commitments, documented recovery objectives, and uptime history all deserve scrutiny. But the goal is not to move existing problems into someone else's data center. It is to reduce the complexity, integration burden, and upgrade cost that have built up over years of running legacy systems. That same philosophy extends beyond infrastructure and into how emerging technologies, particularly AI, are deployed and governed.
AI that earns trust instead of asking for it
Most CIOs aren't AI skeptics. They're skeptical of AI sold without governance.
They want it to improve planning, operational decision-making, predictive maintenance, and business processes, embedded in systems they already run. That's the design behind Infor Velocity Suite. It follows a staged path: discover, build, measure, and expand, starting with Infor Process Mining as a diagnostic layer before any automation is committed. From there, Infor Industry AI Agents, built on the Infor Agentic Orchestrator and powered by Amazon Bedrock, turn diagnosis into governed execution.
- The Engineering and Design Engineering Agents assess design-change impact and update item structures directly within PLM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) workflows.
- The Project and Project Executive Agents flag risks across the program portfolio, and the Inventory Agent surfaces shortages in real time.
- The Buyer and Purchasing Agents manage purchase order (PO) updates and supplier exceptions autonomously.
- The General Ledger, Accounts Payable (AP), and Accounts Receivable (AR) Agents automate routine financial tasks in coordination with finance.
The Infor Agentic Orchestrator governs how agents interact with systems, data, and each other. It provides full visibility, automated quality checks, and enterprise-grade security, the three requirements that separate AI pilots from AI in production.
So, what does all this mean to you?
Rather than one AI trying to do every job at once, you get a set of specialists, each trained on a single task. One watches for engineering changes, another tracks inventory, another manages purchase orders, another closes the books, and every one of them answers to a system that checks their work before it takes effect. It works the way a well-run shop floor does: You don't hand a new hire every job on day one. You train them on one task, let them prove themselves at it, and have a supervisor sign off before anything ships.
Why is this important?
For a CIO, automation you can't audit is a risk you're taking on faith. Automation that you can trace back, step by step, to a decision is one you can stand behind when your board or your customer asks how a job got done.
Proof, not promises
Manufacturers don’t have to take this on faith. Similar industrial manufacturers are already showing what a modern, industry-specific cloud foundation can deliver.
Oberg Industries, a global contract manufacturer of precision-stamped and machined metal parts, moved to Infor CloudSuite™ Industrial Enterprise to unify planning and operations across its facilities. It now runs at around 90% on-time delivery while using automation and process intelligence to push productivity further.
Independent validation reinforces what manufacturers are already experiencing in practice. A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study commissioned by Infor found a 114% return on investment (ROI) within 20 months, 37% lower integration and customization costs, and 54% faster value realization versus industry peers.
Infor's global “How Possible Happens” research, spanning 3,600 respondents across 15 countries, further quantifies the 42% productivity gap between leaders and laggards, a gap that clean, unified, AI-ready data is built to close.
Infor has also been named a Leader for the fifth consecutive year in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises.
Where this leaves you
A secure, integrated, industry-specific foundation doesn't make technical debt disappear overnight, but it stops it from compounding.
Engineering-to-production integration stops being something your team holds together manually. Security and governance become easier to manage across sites. Acquisitions become easier to absorb. AI shows up in governed, auditable steps tied to outcomes you can point to. Risk goes down, visibility goes up, and technology leads the conversation about transformation instead of being asked to support it after the decision is made.
For metal fabricators, the goal is not simply to move ERP to the cloud. It is to build a foundation that supports growth, automation, AI, and the next generation of manufacturing without carrying decades of complexity forward.
Get more with Infor and disrupt your industry, not your operations. Build the digital foundation that makes transformation possible.
With industry-specific capabilities, real-time visibility, and AI-powered innovation, Infor helps metal fabricators transform complexity into measurable business results. Explore Infor Metal Fabrication ERP software and start unlocking more value from your operations today.
Jennifer Candela
Senior Manager, Industrial Manufacturing, Solution Marketing, Infor
Jennifer Candela is passionate about helping manufacturers unlock the full potential of their people, processes, and technology. Drawing on years of experience implementing Infor solutions and guiding organizations through transformation, she writes about the real challenges, lessons learned, and opportunities shaping modern manufacturing.