The latest Infor ERP LN Upgrade is often seen as a complicated and intimidating task by many companies. Financial reports stating that such projects are expensive and time consuming make matters scarier for chief technical officers (CTOs) to take the decision. However, the fact that most of the ERP upgrade is completed in a short time, fall within reasonable budgets and does not disrupt the business at large.
Also, there is a general perception that most ERP upgrades only benefit the IT departments, but if properly executed it is highly favorable for the entire business. An ERP upgrade can have a far-reaching impact on a business; improve productivity, streamline processes, and reach out and serve new markets.
Infor ERP LN Upgrade: The Positive Side
Most of you would always be wondering when is the appropriate time to go for an ERP upgrade. While you are even considering such an upgrade, these questions might come up in your mind.
- Will the new upgraded version be more complex than the existing one?
- Do our users need the education to navigate, understand the features and adapt to the business processes that get introduced?
- Are there any consultants who are knowledgeable on the new version, simultaneously business savvy?
- Do we need to make a huge investment on upgrade so that the benefits outweigh the costs?
Frankly, there are many more questions than convincing answers. Before we attempt to answer these questions, let us look at some of the challenges with your existing system. Complexity is dramatically growing in IT departments which will grow significantly over the next three years. To beat such complexity, manufacturers will have to improve and speed up their decision-making capability. Weak or incapable IT is developing as the only common crucial obstacle to mastering complexity. Different manufacturers also understand that their prevailing ERP systems have multiple flaws or faults that prevent their ability to enhance decision making.
The following graphic illustrates the responses from the survey on the issue of the current ERP system limitations. Looking at the survey results, we can conclude the respondent’s perception of an ERP upgrade such as :
- Too complicated to integrate perfectly with other present applications.
- It is primarily a financial ERP.
- Too complex and costly to upgrade.
- It does not include industry-specific capabilities available out of the box.
5 Reasons for Infor ERP LN Upgrade & Overcoming challenges
For most enterprises, the main factor that shapes the business case for an ERP upgrade is the return on investment (ROI). Generally, organisations expect the upgraded system to provide higher ROI in a very short time.
Justifying your decision to Infor ERP LN Upgrade system is crucial to your organisation’s maximum productivity. Since you need to obtain the support of your management that will spend a considerable amount for an Infor ERP LN Upgrade, you must list the challenges of an ERP upgrade can address in a certain period to form your business case.
1) Support fast decision-making capabilities due to Infor ERP LN Upgrade
Access to information anywhere anytime helps an organisation in quicker decision making process. What any organisation needs to understand is that by Infor ERP LN Upgrade they are simplifying the whole business process to fall in line with their business structure. For organisations making a switch from legacy to an upgraded version, the potential benefits would be for them to see and experience. In a legacy system, one has to navigate through several myriad paths and sessions to complete one process run, which impacts the whole purpose of meeting a deadline. The upgraded version, on the other hand, boasts of better features, thereby boosting the run time of many complex and time-consuming processes like MRP and integrations to name a few.
2) Offer collaborative or social networking due to Infor ERP LN Upgrade
Style features of Infor ERP LN Upgrade to increase productivity – LN is now capable of generating alerts, tasks, and posts with Ming.le, Infor’s social media collaboration platform. Infor Ming.le™ is a platform that concentrates and controls the activity of the organisation for social collaboration, business process enhancement, and contextual analytics. When employees can follow critical data, events, and people, every touch point across your enterprise becomes organised and actionable.
Integrated tracking enables users to refine key enterprise information/data and functions between disconnected forms of in-office communication.
With Infor Ming.le, you can:
- Easily drill back and navigate to specific Infor applications
- Enable heightened collaboration between business processes
- Get access to recurring and organised conversations around a business topic, with internal and external participants
- See alerts, workflow, analytics and more at a glance, with SoHo UX interface
- Experience common navigation and a common context engine across applications
Let us consider an example: The shop floor division of a company foresees a drop in production while manufacturing a product needed for a critical customer shipment, because of scheduled maintenance activity. The situation is collaboratively discussed with the maintenance department who agrees to shift the maintenance process so that the shipment schedule is not disrupted. All this is achieved within minutes with an Infor ERP LN upgrade.
3) Easy to customise
Customisation is one salient feature that gives ERP an edge over others. It is often said that change is the only constant thing and the modern-day version of Infor ERP LN Upgrade has been developed keeping this adage in mind. Users of Baan IV know how difficult it is (if not impossible) to customise the toolbar, add/hide form columns to the form. With features like customising the grid, it is now easy to personalise change appearance.
Certain user-friendly features have been seamlessly woven into the current versions making it easier for organisations to go for an upgrade. Even the screens have been customised. Changes have been made keeping in mind the difficulties faced by the users while navigating. This will enable the work to be done a lot faster and the processes to sync with the tight schedules and deadlines.
Another noteworthy feature is where the users get the settings about reports set to their preferences, where they would get to see only the pertinent data/fields displayed. The consultants help the users in selecting what would work for them and suggest the best possible combination.
4) Easy to integrate seamlessly with other applications
The Intelligent Open Network (ION) makes life easier to integrate various Infor, non-Infor as well as legacy IT systems. This custom-built centralised solution presents a simplistic but powerful and scalable structure, empowering you to eradicate operational silos, dramatically advance exception management, and obtain unique end-to-end efficiency. ION is a powerful integration program that allows different business systems to share data by translating it into the common language of standardised XML. Explicitness and performance are the driving forces behind Infor ION.
With Infor ION, all applications are published in XML which is, in short, the language of the internet. In all business development or activity, they create an XML report that is issued and contributed to by every application that utilises that report. Infor ION creates an inverted model for enterprise applications that drives them away from immense and complicated middle ware stacks, according to OAGIS standards.
The outcome can be summarised in one word – harmony. With Infor ION you will be able to:
- Integrate Infor as well as third-party software applications together with ease.
- For improving exception management create workflows and alerts.
- Change any business process or design, standardise, monitor them without IT engagement.
- Crucial for connecting applications that happen to have actions that take place outside of them.
- To make a better and quick decision by easily monitoring your entire business.
5) Cost-effective
You only have to spend on consultants’ costs while the licensing costs (ION) are very minimal. If you engage a consulting partner who understands your business, has transparent cost models, robust project management tool kits, you are safeguarded against unnecessary costs (rework, cost of poor quality, etc.). Optimisation of cost and maximum utilisation of resources is the ultimate objective of any business organisation and this is where Infor ERP LN Upgrade proves its credibility. It offers a two-fold advantage wherein the organisation gets to function on a transparent cost model with no hidden costs and is supported by experienced consultants who can also think out of the box. Paying a minimal cost on a robust ERP ensures that any company can reap long time and full-fledged benefits which in turn will strengthen the core business functions.
The advantages of going for an upgrade outweigh its unnoticeable limitations. Any business organisation with zeal to expand and glorify its existence would make the first choice of elevating itself by opting for an upgrade because the features are manifold and the uses are unlimited.
Conclusion:
As an customer for Infor ERP LN Upgrade, you suffer continuous load to adapt your business to changing customer demands and competitive pressures. Taking benefit of the best possible capabilities of your core ERP system is a clever way to keep progressing with increasing demands, giving you a manageable upgrade process efficiently.
CoServe Solution Services use well-organised and determined processes to help you adopt the latest version of Infor LN quickly and efficiently. We at Coserve have years of proven experience helping several Infor LN and Infor Baan customers maintain their software upgrades, from the easiest to the most complex.
