200 manufacturers jump on Infor’s Flex upgrade programme

"Customers have made it clear that they expect more from their software vendor than solutions that do not grow with their business, and must be ripped out and replaced through a prolonged, expensive and risky implementation," comments Dennis Michalis, corporate senior vice president at Infor. "The success of the Infor Flex programme highlights our approach to software upgrades that provides transparency up-front, mitigating the risk of an implementation that runs over on time or budget," he adds. The manufacturing business software giant's approach, which only applies to customers with active maintenance contracts in place, is clearly gaining traction – and it's clever. Infor's Open SOA (service-orientated architecture) technology has been around for a while, but the likelihood is that only the very techie get it. The benefits of "an industry standard business language to distribute data between certain Infor solutions and other systems" are unlikely to be obvious to most. But by offering incentives to upgrade, manufacturers get Open SOA anyway. Then Infor can weave its magic in terms of integrating Infor and non-Infor systems and data sources – and users see the advantages for themselves. Mitsubishi Electric Power Products, in the US, is one. A user of SyteLine since 1997, it used the Flex programme to upgrade from version 6.0 to version 8.0. Infor ERP SyteLine. It also implemented Infor EAM (enterprise asset management), Infor PM 10 and Infor Expense Management – integrating into ERP SyteLine through Infor Open SOA. "Software systems that collect data are useful, but to drive our business operations to the next level we needed to upgrade to a system that provides users with access to information that enables them to make informed, real-time decisions," insists Joseph Marcoz, IT director at Mitsubishi Electric Power Products. "Implementing a new ERP system across our eight divisions is a daunting task, but Infor Flex is simplifying the process by providing a fixed cost and implementation period, as well as a methodology that will minimise our downtime and enable us to quickly be up and running on a system that meets our needs now and into the future," he adds.