How Infor’s Industry AI Helps Manufacturers Improve Business Outcomes

In modern manufacturing practices, it’s vital to be able to cut costs and time without cutting corners. Enter an increasing reliance on AI tools to generate automated and accurate documentation, predict outcomes, and increase the reliability and accuracy of data. Within this realm, Infor is one of the companies offering multiple AI solutions to common manufacturing problems.

Through an email interview with Benton Li and Stuart Potchinsky, Infor’s directors of solutions marketing, we discuss the need for and implementation of these products to further the success of manufacturing processes while ensuring that quality remains paramount. In fact, the argument could be made that these tools are some of the ways professionals are increasing the quality control systems within their workplaces.

Quality Digest: What Infor products are helping drive the AI boom for manufacturing companies at the moment? 

Benton Li and Stuart Potchinsky: Infor’s Industry AI portfolio of solutions is helping manufacturing companies drive better business outcomes through predictive, prescriptive, and generative AI built for Infor’s industry-specific CloudSuite ERP and business applications. Understanding that everyone’s appetite and usage for AI is different, our solutions are tailored for each microvertical and for every user to help simplify a very complex production landscape. 

With predictive decision support, generative AI-powered productivity, and AI-enabled automations, (we equip) manufacturers to deeply personalize customer experiences, accelerate hyperproductive work, and automate end-to-end business processes.

QD: How is generative AI technology changing the manufacturing landscape in terms of supply chains, employee productivity, and product development? 

Li and Potchinsky: With Infor generative AI, manufacturers see their supply chains tap into new levels of efficiency. Use cases include generating an executive project summary; instantly translating business processes into any language; easily understanding, and getting updates on, contract and project performance, such as budget overruns and impacts of project delays; and more. These are just a few of the examples of how Infor generative AI is designed to help users unleash hyperproductive work and optimize every aspect of the supply chain. 

QD: Do you have any predictions for how these cutting-edge tools—such as generative AI and ESG environmental reporting—are going to affect the next 10 years of research, development, and manufacturing? 

Li and Potchinsky: Over the next decade, generative AI and ESG environmental reporting will drive a more sustainable, efficient, and compliant manufacturing sector. With significant advancements in eco-friendly production methods and reduced carbon footprints to accelerating innovation cycles and delivering more personalized products, manufacturers that take advantage of leading technologies will be more agile and better equipped to handle disruptions of their business and the introduction of more environmental regulations. Both AI and ESG will be standard business practice that today are driving new ways of working, but tomorrow will be standard operating practice.  

QD: What are some of the biggest indicators, from your surveys and information gathering, that these generative AI technologies are assisting in creating stronger businesses and products? 

Li and Potchinsky: We’ve seen our early adopters experience notable improvements in operational efficiency across managing complex projects, contracts, and production processes. Adopting new technology is always a balance of risk and reward, and we’ve seen our manufacturing customers adopt AI in areas where they can clearly see immediate benefit and impact. This includes introducing enterprise automation, such as RPA and machine learning, to automate repetitive and manual tasks. Others are turning their focus to generative AI and “conversational” generative AI capabilities, which interact and ask questions about ongoing projects, planning, and contracts, seeking information about possible delays, scheduling changes, and risks. 

For example, a conversational assistance (Infor Gen AI Assistant) use case is the ability to check and compare BOM revisions and complete an impact analysis of engineering changes. The Infor Gen AI Assistant helps assess the disruptive nature of engineering changes in terms of inventory and planned inventory transactions in the total supply chain. 

QD: How has training differed to incorporate the use of generative AI products, such as those from Infor? 

Li and Potchinsky: At Infor, we’ve built generative AI to be directly embedded within Infor CloudSuites with a focus on easing the learning curve of generative AI and adopting capabilities that will improve users’ experience and adoption of key capabilities. With smart widgets and conversational assistance, for example, Infor generative AI ensures that end users experience incremental change paired with tremendous productivity gains. We offer comprehensive guidance from initial discovery to ongoing adoption. Because of the intuitive and familiar nature of generative AI from personal experiences with the likes of Chat GPT, users are more engaged and adopting AI tools more seamlessly. There are also many training use cases for generative AI, from translations to automatic interpretation and tracking of tasks that can be used to educate users on key tasks right at their fingertips.

QD: What are the ways in which generative AI is helping small businesses as well as large corporations? 

Li and Potchinsky: For small businesses, generative AI provides a leap in productivity gains that help build their competitive edge. There’s no question AI is already shaping the competitive landscape and demonstrating tangible ways to boost productivity, lower costs, and directly impact the bottom line while providing a better customer experience. Those businesses that adopt the technology are more likely to reap the rewards and set a new standard for the market and industry. With more time to focus on higher-value activities, Infor generative AI is tailored to the nuances of every industry’s process, creating an even more intuitive user experience within Infor CloudSuite.

For large corporations, Infor generative AI allows for efficiency gains when managing complex, multisite global supply chains. With assisted text generation, project summarization, and critical analysis capabilities, Infor generative AI helps more small and large organizations understand current and potential impacts, assess production and delivery efficiency, and ultimately improve decision making and their competitive advantage position in the market. 

QD: Lastly, what is a relevant statistic you think would surprise most people in the manufacturing industry? 

Li and Potchinsky: McKinsey states that 70% of high-performing organizations report difficulties in developing processes for data governance and integrating data into AI models quickly. That’s why we’ve built Infor generative AI directly in Infor CloudSuite, powered by the Infor OS platform, to bring industry-specific processes, data, and the generative AI technology into one environment so users don’t need to worry about third-party additions to their technology stack.