INFOR

CLOUD TRANSFORMATIONS

Amel Gardner, Infor VP and GM, Middle East and Africa, explains how customers can accelerate their digital transformation journeys with cloud innovations.

What is the main focus for your company at GITEX 2021?

Infor is using its stand creatively to feature distinct zones enabling visitors from specific industries to understand how their organisation can transform and gain the full advantages of the cloud, positioning them to embrace new technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Infor will demonstrate solutions including its industry-specific CloudSuites for industrial manufacturing, distribution, and healthcare, with specialists available to discuss each of these solutions. The company will also showcase its enterprise applications and enterprise resource planning (ERP) engines that are at the heart of its solutions, and which are designed for specific industries. These highly robust solutions manage financial and operational tasks, streamlining processes, eliminating redundancies, and providing end-to-end visibility. unique and help make dramatically better decisions, better customer experiences, or better performance within a specific supply chain. To coin the phrase: ‘this is where the magic happens’ and the leading businesses of tomorrow will spend the majority of time defining, refining and then redefining this last 10%.

This approach keeps implementations on track, keeps teams from wandering off into uncharted “wish lists” and getting lost down blind alleys.

How can customers fast-track their digital transformation ambitions with your solutions?

Firstly, Infor’s dedicated Value Engineering team (who will be unveiled for the first time at GITEX) can demonstrate how every organisation’s most critical business drivers should be aligned with a sound technological strategy. This team, which is dedicated to maximising Infor investments, helps to identify, quantify, and realise the true business value that our products deliver.

Secondly, we recognise that while our various CloudSuites help provide industry specific business processes, not all business processes are created equal. Businesses need to determine which processes are most important to differentiate themselves.

The first 60% of the implementation effort involves core industry leading processes that businesses can adopt with very little effort. These are the processes that are necessary but do not provide differentiation. The goal for these 60% of the processes is very simple: adopt technology that delivers industry best practice, as quickly as possible.

For the next 30%, businesses need to focus on the processes that are differentiators but still fall within the realm of configuration or small tweaks. While this does demand some effort, a business is not starting with a blank sheet, but instead is choosing from options can be quickly tailored and configured to best fit their needs.

The goal of these first two steps is to free up more time and capacity to focus on the final 10% of processes that are highly differentiating/

Which aspects of digital transformation are customers not paying adequate attention to?

Although companies feel they are data rich, they are not making the most of their data potential. Yes, they are creating masses of data, as they have for years, but failing to unlock its true potential. It could even open up new revenue streams. There is a huge opportunity if they can deploy more predictive and prescriptive analytics, not to mention the opportunities with Big Data, AI and ML.

Can you elaborate on your plans for the regional market over the next few quarters?

Infor has more than 750 active customers in the Middle East and many of them are moving to our multi-tenant cloud platform (on AWS). We’re really looking to accelerate by quintupling (x5) our SaaS business by 2025 in the Middle East, so this means growing by 40% each year (CAGR) which we will achieve by focusing on our core industries.