Crowning glory for Infor

Crown House Technologies, the engineering arm of construction giant Laing O’Rourke is to go live with a Visual ERP system from acquisitive Infor Global Solutions next month. Crown House, which makes mechanical and electrical devices and plant to-order for large construction projects, expects to get the efficiencies of information sharing, centralised capacity planning, and support for automated demand-driven operations. Says production manager Peter Jones: “We are adding two interfaces from Infor to Laing O’Rourke’s central Coins purchasing system.” Those will give visibility of purchasing, materials receipt and the rest between the systems. Meanwhile, Infor’s latest acquisition is on its process industry business side, with US-based Formation Systems, which develops product lifecycle management (PLM) software. For an undisclosed sum. “The addition of PLM to our product portfolio expands Infor’s capabilities to integrate, streamline, and manage the entire process of product development,” says Jim Schaper, chairman and CEO for Infor. He says that the expanded Infor Process ERP suite will enable companies to improve product development efficiency and respond faster to market demands, while also reducing costs. Coming so soon after distribution software firm Intuita, and with Mapics, Frontstep, Lilly, Mercia, Brain and a string of other ERP and supply chain names under its belt, it’s clear that this company means to steal the mid market across all industrial sectors.