Future perfect

For any business mulling its IT strategy, a key consideration is the precise nature of the future which that strategy is designed to address. And for many of today's manufacturers, the broad shape of that future is already becoming apparent, says Phil Lewis, business consulting director at enterprise applications vendor Infor. But the way to see that future isn't by throwing around the usual buzzwords, he stresses. "Mobile, cloud, analytics, social – yes, the future will involve these. But it will be driven by what users want to do with them rather than the technologies themselves," he says. Consider the following scenario, suggests Lewis. A manufacturing manager is walking the factory floor, carrying a mobile device – perhaps an iPad, or other tablet – instead of a clipboard. And as they walk around, everything that they need to know is presented to them, updating as they move from place to place. "Everything important to them is presented to them on the tablet, and it's all in context. It's taking information from people, applications, machines, data repositories and document repositories, and bringing it all together into an enterprise-wide decision-making structure," enthuses Lewis. "He or she has a fully-informed decision-making environment where and when they need it, all in context, and all of it in the form of accurate, actionable information," he continues. "It's not about making better decisions, but about making the best decisions." And it's viewing the future through the lens of a scenario such as this that underscores the difference between a buzzword-based strategy and one that is driven by user wants and needs, emphasises Lewis. Analytics, for instance, is often thought of in terms of business intelligence-style KPIs, dashboards and the familiar 'drill down'. But that won't work in a mobile environment that is intended to continually update information as users move around the factory, he points out. Instead, he says, it needs to be analytics in the form of contextual pre-digested real-time analytics, appropriate for where the user is physically at a point in time. Which, he adds, is where cloud-based capabilities come in. On-premise technology in the form of a business's own servers can handle business intelligence in the form of reports, dashboard and 'drill down' capabilities. But real-time analytics carried out 'on the fly' calls for more computing horsepower to deliver actionable insights and metrics on demand, high in context and with minimal latency. Enter the cloud, with its high-powered and scalable processing capabilities, which can deliver real-time analytics in the timescale required. Likewise, at first glance, you would think that social media would have little or no place on a factory floor. But you'd be wrong, says Lewis: it is in many ways central to the vision. Lessons on application design and functionality Infor, he says, has been looking at how people use computers in their everyday social lives, interacting with apps such as Facebook and Twitter, and has seen huge lessons in terms of application design and functionality. Part of the reason for the huge success of applications such as Facebook lies, in short, with how they bring to the user a view of events that is drawn from many sources, yet is customised to each user's interests and needs. "It's more than just aesthetics, or a crisp clean interface; it's about design, and productivity, and maximising the flow of information," he says. "As consumers, we can subscribe to, or 'follow', individual people, topics and places; it's an easy and powerful way of staying in touch with what matters and what's important. So a salesperson should be able to 'like' or subscribe to a customer, to see everything that affects that customer and a manufacturing manager should be able to 'follow' a works order or piece of production equipment." In short, sums up Lewis, a strategy of 'going mobile' or 'adopting analytics', if carried out in isolation, is likely to miss the mark in terms of what users need. Better by far, he stresses, is an approach that is focused on how people within manufacturing can work more productively, and interact more efficiently with the information that they need – wherever that information is. "It's not so much the 'internet of things', to use the jargon of the day, but the 'internet of manufacturing'," he observes. "It's about joining together everything on the factory floor, or which is connected to it, and then delivering that information to where it is needed, right in front of the user." But how close is that vision to being turned into reality? Or will we see a repetition of the 'lights out' factory – a vision of the future of automation touted since the 1980s and one which is still seemingly just around the corner today, over 30 years later? Technology is here today As an industry, responds Lewis, enterprise application developers in general are closer than might be imagined. "The technology to do all this is here today," he points out. "The challenge lies in having the vision and the ability to convert technological advances into meaningful and useful enterprise applications and not gimmicks." What's more, Infor itself is closer than many to achieving this, having already invested in developing and leveraging some of the underlying technologies. And, he adds, central to closing the gap and turning the vision into reality is a product strategy that supports innovation yet is firmly anchored to user requirements and a standards-based architecture. "You have to have a clear, focused and established product strategy," he stresses. "You can't do it as a series of knee-jerk piecemeal developments." Happily, it seems that Infor has just such a product strategy. Crisply enumerating what he calls the "three pillars of focused innovation," Lewis sums up the technology platform which underpins the firm's whole approach to enterprise application development, ticking each one off on his fingers. "First, you've got to have an internet architecture," he says. "You've got to be able to see the internet as a template for applications that can talk to the outside world, yet which are loosely coupled and standards-based." "Second, we're talking manufacturing here, so you need industry-specific applications which will form the transactional engine room. We've got well-established, industry-specific applications with a history that goes back 25-30 years." "And third, you have to be focused on the end user and on creating user experiences that people love. And it's this third pillar that really pulls things together in terms of delivering the vision – bringing in the social aspect, removing the barriers to information access with mobility and delivering analytics in a meaningful and contextual way." In short, he sums up, combine all three, and you have a compelling proposition for any manufacturer: A vision of excellence, and a proven way of transforming that vision into reality. "And at Infor, that's our mission," he concludes. Learn more about Infor at www.infor.com or contact Infor at ukmarketing@infor.com