My colleague Rick Franzosa and I attended the Infor Analyst Innovation Summit, and it was aptly named. This company, formed from over 60 acquisitions, has had to innovate to come together to tell a strong story across its product lines and industries. The corporate vision is “The Agentic Enterprise,” and I can see where the industry-specific companies at the core form a solid starting point. We learned too much to express here, so I’ll focus on the vision, product status, and what’s new for both discrete and process industries.
Infor’s Vision
Infor envisions taking its customers from embedded intelligence to autonomous orchestration of industry-specific agents and employees. What CEO Kevin Samuelson articulated (having been in the post for nearly 10 years and previously serving as the company’s CFO) showed how the company’s rich history has led to this point.
Starting with acquiring software companies that had an industry-specific focus, moving into building out the industry CloudSuites was the older history. Since 2018, Infor has been building process mining, robotic process automation (RPA), and AI. Then last year, they announced the Velocity Suite, combining all of those to help diagnose, automate, and optimize business processes using generative AI.
That foundation has enabled them to build orchestrated industry-specific agents. This would lead to semi-autonomous “headless” UX with human-in-the-loop (HITL). Fully autonomous orchestration, driven by outcomes and rich context, can eventually lead to what they call ‘governed velocity’ for the business. Their vision includes all four delivered in parallel for software that is precise, cohesive, agile, and trustworthy.
The story is not just one of software, but also of a customer journey that can match each customer’s pace and needs. We see this as a crucial element to customers’ ability to execute the vision. Infor has also been building out its approach and ecosystem to support the customer journey.
Product Overview
Infor has long been building out industry-specific enterprise software suites. These are now available as CloudSuites that leverage the extensive Infor Cloud platform. Beyond ERP, these suites may include PLM, configure, price quote (CPQ), supply chain, MES, WMS, and performance management, all tailored for that specific industry’s needs. Each CloudSuite includes Industry Process Catalogs (IPCs) to provide strong operating models for implementation, ongoing continuous improvement, and AI context.
Infor’s cloud platform rests on AWS and inherits all of those cybersecurity and infrastructure benefits. Beyond SaaS hosting, the platform includes many data-fabric components, including streaming and a knowledge graph, which deliver important benefits for a rich manufacturing context and understanding.
Layered on top of that is a decision-intelligence platform with industry-specific LLMs, plus agentic identity and semantics. The agentic automation layer draws on industry-specific knowledge of Infor applications and teams. An adaptive enterprise experience tops off the suite’s usability. LLMs for natural language interaction are part of this, but they’re also designed to be actionable for each user by role and exception.
Infor focuses on eight industries, five of which are in manufacturing. These include automotive, A&D, and Industrial on the discrete side, and food & beverage and fashion & apparel, plus distribution. Infor does not stop there, but focuses on specific micro-verticals within each overall industry as well.
Process Manufacturing Highlights
Infor’s CloudSuite food & beverage includes far more than traditional ERP. CloudSuite Food & Beverage also has:
- PLM for formulation optimization, recipe management, and product labels. An example is Keurig Dr. Pepper, which reports 30% shorter time to market for new products.
- MES that is both comprehensive and well-proven in these industries without being too heavy or rigid. Taylors of Harrogate used it to maximize capacity by capturing microstoppages in its 2000-tea-bags-per-minute-per-machine operation. They report, “In a few months, Infor MES has fundamentally changed the way we work.”
- Synchronization of supply and demand to plan inventory and maximize service levels, including scenario planning and sequence and shelf-life-aware scheduling. Customer Reynolds says, “The entire stock of the business is turned over within 36 hours.”
- Managing raw material variables with attributes includes AI-based blend and yield optimization and the ability to target specific product lots for recall in a single click. Customer Amalthea reported €500K annual savings for every 1% increase in yield.
- Beyond supply chain, the suite also includes trade promotion management (TPM), warehouse management (WMS), and MES.
- For environmental sustainability and governance (ESG), and from Oct 2026 it also includes digital product passports, the ability to import ESG data per item or material, and the allocation of scope 1 and 2 to products. It also has modules coming for product tax, emissions, EUDR (deforestation), and CBAM for imported CO2 into the EU.
We heard from Fernando Cardoso, Finance Director and Functional IT director at animal nutrition company Nutreco, about their journey to reaching 3000 users (1/4 of the employees) across their 130 factories and 60 divisions in 35 countries. They started on-prem with M3 in 2010, moved to single-tenant CloudSuite in 2020, and went live with multi-tenant CloudSuite for Food & Beverage in 2023. By 2024, they had over 350 streaming pipelines with over 40 million events per day. RPA on SharePoint came into play that year as well. Last year, they started Process Mining and were an early adopter of GenAI. Nutreco went live with agents early this year for inventory and lot summaries, and they’re adopting agents for price simulation, order exceptions, and replacing older workflows.
Infor CloudSuite Fashion has similarly compelling capabilities and customer wins across design, supply chain, and production, including scheduling. Luxury, sports, and many other fashion brands had cited benefits.
Discrete Manufacturing Highlights
Infor has over 4,000 discrete industry customers, with over 1,000 on the cloud. Its CloudSuites for Industrial Manufacturing, Automotive, A&D, and Engineering & Construction go well beyond core ERP has over 4000 discrete industry customers, with over 1000 on the cloud. Beyond core ERP, the offerings include
- PLM and CPQ are natively integrated with ERP to streamline time to market. Customers such as EPS gain more accurate business insights with this unified ERP-PLM platform.
- APS for mixed-mode manufacturing plus IoT-enabled MES. Customer SKM increased capacity by 30% and reduced production lead times from 15 to 10 days, all in the same year, using these solutions.
- Engineering change and BOM control from as-designed to as-built to as-serviced, along with native support for an array of production approaches (ATO, ETO, CTO, MTs, and HMLV) with integrated MRP and APS. Oberg Industries uses Infor to help manage their 3000-4000 production orders at any given time.
- GenAI and Service agents can protect margins and enhance customer satisfaction. CombiLift reports a 30% increase in first-time fix rate and a 40% service job cost reduction.
We heard from customers Jennifer Terry of Xpress Boats, Bipin Jayaraj of Benchmark Electronics, and Zoaib S. of Amada America on a panel. Koch and Zahid Group also presented their successes. Having once been a Baan employee, it’s amazing to see the growth in capabilities and customers under Infor’s brand.
Our Take
We feel the Infor Suites, from micro-vertical application suites to a full data stack, to every flavor of AI, is a solid foundation for in-context action by people and agents. The IPCs seem to be the best of industry templates and best practices, without being too rigid.
Its customer journey, adoption tracking, and next value recommendations are what customers need to move into the agentic future Infor envisions. We also love the baked-in industry benchmarking of what’s in use for the industry CloudSuites.
Infor has come a long way, and we’re particularly excited to see that Infor MES will finalize its migration to the cloud platform this year. We have seen the value of multi-tenant cloud solutions, and Infor’s complete stack magnifies it.
Thank You
We appreciate the invitation from Jennifer Marzolf and the attention from the entire analyst relations team: Eileen Koach, Cindy Duco, and Krista Maddox. Shout out for the one-on-one time with Matt Barber 👀, Chris Gibson, and Stephen Burden from the Infor MES team. Also Vishal Minocha, VP Product Management, Andrew Kinder and Andrew Dalziel, VPs Industry and Solution Strategy, and Ole Rasmussen, SVP Product Management.
