The ‘Office of the CFO’ focuses on strategy and the latest technological innovations. President Stephan Scholl in a recent Infor dinnr in Paris announced that Infor is the 3rd largest global ERP provider and the fastest growing business software company last year with:
- 2,300 new customers
- 3,000 new employees.
Infor’s branding overhaul – visit www.infor.com and results in a much cleaner design. The new look will shortly be incorporated across SunSystems and all of the Infor solutions. It is also good to see a return to the simpler ‘Infor SunSystems’ naming convention.
Infor 10x ships in November. Here is a selection of eInfor SunSystems (V6.1.5) enhancements that are available or that can be added to the core SunSystems solution:
- Windows 8 and SQL Server 2012 certified.
- WorkSpace – Delivers a unified user experience that supports single sign-on, common navigation. The user interface combines deep industry processes, analytics, and collaboration that helps you make better and faster decisions.
- SocialSpace – A social business platform that: shares objectives, captures the conversation and keeps data in context. The Activity Feed connects: staff, applications, machines and data in real-time so they work better together. There is an in context application called ‘Paparazzi’ which allows users to ‘follow’ crucial business processes.
- Mobile innovation – You can access key features in an intuitive tablet/mobile experience. Simply provide your web connection details to connect to your organisation’s SunSystems server.
- Alerts, notifications and exceptions – Set up notifications for the events that are of relevance to you, for example the creation of projects, customers and orders received over a certain amount. These are then delivered to you via email or within the Activity Feed, allowing you to proactively monitor your system.
Why does Infor Susnstems have such dedicated users? Product’s users delight their ability to easily get the information they need when they need it, and to adapt to changes without really changing the system (time and again).
Two key enabling design features are the Unified Ledger and Smart Transactions. The, Unified Ledger enables there is an immediate availability for combined (unified) reporting across AP, AR, and GL.
real-time posting across payables, receivables, and ledger, with no reconciliation required.
Smart Transactions refers to the ability of SunSystems to adapt the transactional data captured to meet business and reporting needs. This is a feature built into the fundamental architecture of the ledger, and it does not rely on any other external technology.
The SunSystems ledger has a sophisticated coding approach that does not rely on traditional segmented account codes with a fixed structure. Instead, it uses simple chart of accounts (COA) plus a range of user definable analysis dimensions that have independent coding structures—much like an OLAP cube.
The result is a flexible coding structure that can be configured to meet the needs of every business unit, and even refined to capture different additional data, depending on the account or the type of transaction. Configure the ledger to define the dimensions of data you want, and also easily adapt (modify) the account’s structure as business needs change. The system does not rely on generating all the permutations of account and segments (which can result in a massive combinatorial explosion).
New dimensions can be added as required to adapt evolving data needs. The dimensional structure of the ledger is well suited to analysis, and this is exploited to the full extent by the advanced Query & Analysis tool. This simple tool provides a reporting environment for end users and accountants to design their own reports with no dependence on information technology (IT) . Data is aggregated on an as-required basis, without being bound by predetermined rollup and balances, enabling Smart Transactions to deliver the results from any desired perspective.
SunSystems holds the Smart Transactions dimnesionally which is ideal for a slice-and-dice reporting tool such as Query & Analysis. The reporting tool understands the metadata describing the Smart Transaction structure. Sunsysems Query @ Analysis tool aplty knwon as “Vision”, understands the transactions and provides a simple interface for users to inquire without knowledge of the underlying database, tables and views to get OLAP-style analytics from the source ledger system. The Unified Ledger is similar to Smart Transactions—it is fundamental to the application design and architecture, and does not rely on any special additional technology.
The Infor technology platform now oes much furher with the underpinning ION technology which is transforming concepts of both “what?” and “how?” enterprise systems should deliver.
See these You Tube videos, and contact us for more information:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxL1HtV_ebo&feature=relmfu
