Infor is a leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) software provider, offering solutions that help companies of any size, location, or industry simplify and optimize business processes. Infor offers industry-specific solutions that meet customers’ needs in healthcare, retail, automotive, distribution, hospitality, and more.

Read on to learn more about Infor’s CloudSuite solution and how it can help enterprise-sized companies maximize their total technological investment.

What is Infor CloudSuite?

Infor CloudSuite is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software built for enterprise-sized companies to help optimize how your company operates and your employees work. The cloud-based ERP solution offers multiple products, modules, and tools to help companies manage their data, improve the productivity of their system, and grow their business in a way that meets their needs.

For more information on making the switch to Infor Cloudsuite, click here.

The Big Three

When it comes to the CloudSuite Corporate product, Infor offers a one-stop shop for all of your company’s core ERP solution needs. CloudSuite Corporate offers solutions that help optimize financial processes, enterprise performance, supply chain, and human capital management operations.

CloudSuite Global HR

Infor’s Global Human Resources (GHR) is a mobile-enabled, cloud-based solution that automates manual processes, improves system and employee productivity, unifies data across systems, and provides meaningful insights to improve HR functionality.

The Infor GHR solution gives users the opportunity to:

  • Control their own experience through self-service options
  • Track and manage benefits plans and packages
  • Maintain accurate scheduling, time entry, and absence management functions

And, as more companies expand their Human Capital Management (HCM) suites, Infor has expanded its Talent Management offerings to meet the needs of changing workforces.

Infor’s Talent Management solution uses advanced talent insights to help managers, administrators, and company executives understand the best ways to optimize their enterprise resource planning operations and keep their employees engaged and satisfied in the long run.

Here are a few capabilities of the CloudSuite Talent Management solution:

  • Use advanced talent data to personalize roles and workforce teams
  • Improve transparency, communication, and collaboration among employees
  • Find, attract, and retain the right employees for your workforce
  • Empower knowledge transfer through learning and development solutions

CloudSuite Financials

Infor CloudSuite Financials is a financial management solution based on user roles. The solution allows users to manage project accounting, streamline financial processes, and develop solutions to keep their projects on time and within budget.

CloudSuite Financials allows users to:

  • Manage contracts, projects, and capital investments with a single solution
  • Define and maintain multiple financial calendars at one time
  • Create basis definitions by combining general ledger information with schedules and charts of accounts
  • Manage receivables and billing, including intercompany billing
  • Meet complex reporting requirements, including adjustments, eliminations, allocations, and compliance controls

CloudSuite Supply Management

CloudSuite Supply Management allows Infor users to streamline procurement, sourcing, and supply chain management with a single solution. This fully integrated solution simplifies supply management and makes it easier for companies to track supplies, organize orders, manage supplier relationships, and optimize supply chain functionality.

With CloudSuite Supply Management, Infor users can:

  • Update and assign resources based on roles and responsibilities
  • Build and maintain stronger relationships with suppliers
  • Keep track of key inventory and warehouse management processes
  • Manage strategic sourcing initiatives, requisitions, purchase orders, punchout, contract management, mobile supply chain management (MSCM), and other key supply chain objectives
  • Leverage the Source-to-Settle solution to control spending, reduce costs, and increase compliance

Industry-Specific CloudSuite Solutions

  • Infor CloudSuite Industrial: This end-to-end ERP solution simplifies buying, manufacturing, digital transformation, deployment, and adaptation to give users access to the information they need whenever and wherever they need it.
  • Infor CloudSuite Healthcare: CloudSuite Healthcare brings financial management, accounting, supply chain, and HR functions together in a single, cloud-based solution, making it easier than ever for healthcare organizations to reduce costs and improve productivity.
  • Infor CloudSuite Retail: This solution offers retailers and brands the opportunity to increase the speed and accuracy of the supply chain, improve inventory accuracy, and deliver better shopping experiences for buyers and end-users.

Focus on the Fours

There are four main things your organization needs to build out before getting into an Infor CloudSuite implementation: your organizational structure, your chart of accounts, your vendor master, and your item master. Let’s take a closer look at each…

1) Organizational Structure

First, understand what your organizational structure (which includes reporting and budgeting) will be in the new system. You need to know how your new ship will operate before you take it out into open waters.

2) Chart of Accounts

Next, determine what your chart of accounts will be. This ties in closely with the organizational structure but only measures what you will reward. So, if you’re not going to budget at a specific level, say for an account or at an organizational structure level, what’s the point of spending time and energy building something you won’t use?

3) Vendor Master

You’ll also need to focus on what your vendor master will look like in the new system. This involves who you’re doing business with and how you will manage those relationships. Think of your contract management or supplier management. 

4) Item Master

The final critical area to tackle early is your item master, including your inventory and product purchase mix. This will lead you back to the vendor master and contact management planning piece as well. 

Best Practices for Implementing Infor CloudSuite

Here are a few best practices to set yourself up for success with a new CloudSuite solution…

Check Your Supply Chain

In the first few days of your Go-Live process, you’ll need to focus on making sure your supply chain is working properly, including things like mobile supply chain requisition, self-service requisitioning, and purchase order transmission.

You’ll also want to ensure that EDI (outbound and inbound) transactions and your third-party software or document handling are flowing as expected to maximize operations from the beginning of your Infor CloudSuite experience.

Own the Documentation

During the implementation process, you’ll need to create a flowchart and track inventory for every business process, and if your organization doesn’t drive this task, you’ll get to the end of the project and realize you don’t understand your own complex processes.

Owning documentation from the flowchart to the scripting will help you better understand your new business processes in the system, ensuring you hit the ground running with Infor CloudSuite from Day One.

Test Your Solutions

Whether you’re deploying Infor CloudSuite in the cloud or on-premises, you must do some level of stress testing to ensure your new systems can handle future growth and change across your entire ERP solution.

The two biggest culprits of system resource issues are accounts payable and human resources payroll, as they process the most transactions. During your implementation, it’s vital that you stress-test based on the number of processing threads allocated to the production environment.

Additionally, test the entire build-out if you plan to use a requisition or invoice approval. Trust us on this one — typically, when an organization skips this testing step, they inevitably run into issues down the road.

Train Your Employees

Training will be an ongoing process within your organization, but it’s a significant focus in the post-go-live process to ensure your employees understand their new CloudSuite solution and can operate each area of the solution correctly.

Instead of using generic materials to teach your staff about the features and capabilities of Infor CloudSuite, you can provide them with customized instruction specific to the processes your team has adopted during implementation, preparing them for long-term success.

How Can We Help?

Whether you need help optimizing your supply chain operations to keep up with product demand when lives are on the line in the healthcare industry, an extra hand implementing a global HR solution to improve employee productivity, additional support managing key integrations, or anything in between, Surety Systems is here to help.

With their extensive skills and experience in the Infor arena, our team of senior-level Infor consultants is guaranteed to fit the needs of any project, whether you’re reaching out for new services or you’ve worked with our team multiple times before.

Contact us today to learn more, or get started with one of our expert Infor consultants!