New York, N.Y.—May 20, 2013—Infor, a provider of business application software serving more than 70,000 customers, announced a Social Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) model to bolster collaboration and establish dynamic supply chain management.
“Planning for profit and making decisions are major concerns that impact the supply chain and doing so effectively requires faster reactions that based on real-time, accurate information from internal and external stakeholders,” said John Bermudez, Vice President, Product Management, Infor. “Infor has transformed S&OP by embedding Infor Ming.le social collaboration so that issues are immediately visible to the whole management team, empowering them to develop resolutions interactively in real-time. Infor Ming.le provides a history of how consensus was reached, complete with links into Infor Enterprise Applications to support the decision making process with live data. A best-practice S&OP process has always required great collaboration. With Infor Social S&OP, collaboration is built-in to deliver real value, quickly and effectively.”
Infor's Social S&OP model is an innovative approach to sync compartmentalized facets of communication across the S&OP process on a real-time basis. Infor Ming.le, a platform for social collaboration, business process improvement and contextual analytics, powers Infor's Social S&OP model. Subscribing to this method allows organizations to transcend traditional boundaries, empowering S&OP stakeholders to make better, faster decisions through access to real-time data, events and exception management generated alerts. Social S&OP unites the communication across the various key elements of the S&OP process such as sales forecasts, financial objectives, distribution schedules, product lifecycle assessments and inventory levels.
Infor's Social S&OP offering further utilizes common social functionality to provide greater collaboration in areas where traditional methods such as email are becoming ineffective. Much like consumer-based social platforms, users are able to receive a newsfeed that is relevant to their business needs. Instead of following an individual or company, users can follow, share and comment on a sales order; promotion; client; brand; production job; or event. The visibility established by following these workflows allows employees to use the most accurate information and remain dynamic in their decision-making.
Infor Social S&OP embeds a powerful exception management engine that utilizes alerts and workflow types to ensure each team member stays up-to-date on the project status and can take immediate action if required. Users can benefit from a Social S&OP model across various stations within the supply chain. A depot manager is able to receive a stock alert for product inventory levels. From there, the manager can note the product availability within the real-time workflow to ensure end-to-end management; and close the loop from order-to-delivery.
As accountability is a major concern for the adoption of social business tools, social interactions are tracked by the S&OP tool. This helps prevent the pitfalls associated with unstructured and external communications, which tend to lack auditability. The application helps ensure that communications remain in context and that discussions stay paired to specific developments. Social interactions go beyond problems and alerts, they can simply inform contributors about what is happening. Traditional S&OP tracks only problems. Social S&OP can also inform of relevant day-to-day news feeds. Social postings can occur between people, applications, and things such as web services and newsfeeds.
