INFOR PROCESS SOLUTIONS:
NEW EXPECTATIONS
It’s not every day that a proven end-to-end software solution is available from one supplier—one to help you improve efficiency, profitability, and sustainability without functional trade-offs or the need for extensive custom coding. It is even less frequent that such a solution is tailored to fit the needs of the broad range of process industries and company sizes in the market. And it’s frankly unheard of that its scope can improve all areas of your value chain—today as well as in the future. Yet that’s exactly what Infor™ has done to help companies ensure continued competitiveness. Building on the company’s years of delivering value to over 3,500 customers around the world, Infor has created something that very few have attempted and none have achieved, until now. This relatively young, but historically rich, software giant has integrated its process-centric applications so that they now span sample-driven or new product development and introduction processes, financial and performance management, customer service, supply chain and production planning, sourcing, plant scheduling, inventory optimization, operations and quality management, tracking and compliance, plant maintenance, order fulfillment, and
deduction management.
The applications encompass the most wide-ranging suite ever built for the process sector, able to handle nearly all of today's requirements, particularly in food and beverage, consumer packaged goods (CPG), life sciences, and specialty chemicals manufacturing.
It couldn’t have come at a better time. With rising commodity, energy, and transportation costs and reduced consumer discretionary spending, companies must improve efficiencies and more
With Process Solutions,
Infor is delivering an
end-to-end solution
for the process
sector that will
transform expectations.
Compliance is another issue—not helped by tighter financial markets, increased outsourcing, enhanced power of the mega retailer or customer, greater consumer migration across channels, and changing consumer preferences. As the importance of collaboration is increasing, companies must effectively minimize risks. For example, if a single supplier cannot deliver, a plant unit fails, or product material causes a recall, enterprises must act at warp speed. Today’s aggressive regulatory regime also poses challenges: local materials provenance and usage restrictions, food labeling and audit trails of ingredients, formulations, production and packaging for 21 CFR 11, allergens, REACH, OSHA, and environmental compliance. And handling product recalls requires yet another set of steps. All demand tight data capture and better, faster procedures, processes, and reporting. Topping all of that is relentless global competition. All of these challenges mean that brand owners and plant managers need new ways to maximize the effectiveness of product development at one end, and promotional campaigns at the other—while cutting time and costs throughout the process. It’s about acting smarter and collaborating better across departments and systems. Starting from project or sample request approval with hurdle rates and feasibility ratings, to searching and comparing information that ensures you start with compliant materials, everyone needs access to accurate and relevant data. An optimum process is lean material management, a formula and packaging model that includes cost, performance, sourcing, and compliance data that is integrated into workflows, projects, stages, gates, and portfolios. This increased data reuse eliminates non-value activities, ensures quality and compliance, improves decision making, and improves product success rates and margins. Infor Process Solutions delivers precisely all of these capabilities. It includes modules for enterprise resource planning (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM), supply chain management (SCM), and enterprise asset
management (EAM), all tightly integrated.
FOUR SOLUTIONS IN ONE.
Each module package within Infor Process Solutions was developed specifically to deal with issues unique to process manufacturing. For example, ERP:
• Supports formulas, recipes, inverted bills of materials, and manufacturing to bulk, but packing to different sizes • Handles shelf-life as well as yield-based and
quality-based blending and intermediates • Enables full lot track and trace
• Looks after tank management, labeling, compliance management, and reporting, as well as multiple simultaneous costing methods and simulation The benefits of this application are unprecedented visibility, enabling a new level of agile, demand-driven operations all the way from product concept to packing, irrespective of regional issues, promotions, currency, language, and time. What’s more, these gains occur while costs to service customers drop.
Because the applications are integrated, all processes remain in sync during upgrades. Most importantly, Infor insists on starting small and reducing time to value, incrementally adding solutions to achieve best-in-class results without ripping and replacing.
ERP: BUILT FOR PROCESS.
In the process industries, a wish list for an ERP environment is likely to be specific, but wide-ranging—one that has never been met by a single software vendor. That list will almost certainly include:
• Lot-tracked and non-lot-tracked materials
• Lot genealogy for “used-in” and “made-from” tracking • Formula management with units-of-measure conversions • Formula balancing and ingredient substitutions, including
by-products and co-products • Pack bills of material with nesting
• Integrated quality management with tracking of test results against purchased and manufactured lots
Beyond these items could be support for:
• 21 CFR 11 • Controlled materials
• Country-of-origin ingredients labeling (COOL) • Catch weight with quality test results inherited from
master lot, plus sublot overrides
• Dynamic weights and measures with activity control and dry weight at item and lot level
• Lot and sublot management covering capability and genealogy
• Process variability and variance reporting
• Tank management with lot blending and cost averaging • Actual cost tracking to lot level with
post-transaction adjustments
That’s not all. The system should also recognize:
• Market- and commodity-based pricing, promotional pricing, deductions, and trade funds—and integrate them with accounts receivable
• Allocation processing for first-in, first-out (FIFO), last-in, first-out (LIFO), or first-ended, first-out (FEFO) rules • Process management by formula, routing, effectivity
date, and costing
This entire wish list describes Infor ERP Adage—the
organization’s updated, entirely process-centric ERP system, developed over the years with food and beverage, CPG, pharmaceutical, and chemicals manufacturers around the world. This is now the backbone of Infor’s new end-to-end Process Solutions, which also integrates software for supply chain planning and scheduling, demand and inventory management, PLM, and EAM.
SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT.
The process manufacturing sector looks significantly different from discrete manufacturing not only in production. Supply chain planning and scheduling are notoriously complex, due to factors such as the variability of ingredients and intermediates, process yield variances, shelf-life considerations, tank and vessel capacity constraints, and batch-sequencing issues.
Demand and inventory replenishment management is also complicated, contributed mostly by the industry’s emphasis on campaigns and relatively short product lifecycles. For example, baking a cookie is very different from
manufacturing the oven, but the differences lie in more than just mixing ingredients and assembling components. Other important elements are lot traceability, yield losses, allergens or volatility, evaporation, and volume- and flow rate-based capacity limits of tanks, silos, and pipelines.
Additional factors defining process manufacturing are long-range planning and short-term scheduling, which can be extremely involved, yet the success of their management determines profitability. Consumer products companies, which tend to be promotionally oriented, must also react to competitors’ offers.
The upshot is that process users are likely to need sophisticated algorithms to forecast the supply chain implications of potentially thousands of product categories at the plant, location, and account levels, and to recognize
Another requirement that process manufacturers must meet is tight collaboration among the teams working with new products and phase-outs. Warehousing and distribution restrictions also must be addressed, such as types of containers and their capacities, refrigeration or ambient storage and transportation, product types that need to be separated, and the list goes on.
Infor’s answer to these challenges is a complete supply chain suite that spans demand, inventory replenishment and production planning, scheduling and optimization, as well as warehousing and transportation. It offers the best of both worlds—deep process functionality from the company’s proven process system acquisitions, combined with significant investment in new technologies for today’s savvy users. One such investment involves Infor’s demand planning application, which has been completely re-engineered in Java to transform its ability to scale and integrate with Infor and non-Infor business systems.
SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: AN
OUT-OF-THE-BOX SOLUTION.
Infor SCM Advanced Planner can be configured to handle any combination of production capacities, distribution routes, material availability, and labor resources, and enable assessment of any permutations, trade-offs, and constraints to deliver an optimal plan for the whole supply chain, not just part of it.
The system can be tuned to: • Plan across multiple sites
• Integrate suppliers capable of promising to improve capacity or agility
• Balance product mix capability with profitability • Consider shelf-life constraints in build-ahead strategies • Choose the optimal product recipe or formula based on
material and plant availability versus demand Key strengths of Infor SCM Advanced Planner include:
• A multiple constraint-based planning engine with in-memory solver for speed and responsiveness • User-definable constraints covering production capacities
and transport capacities
• Labor and skills assessment tools with alternative sourcing options
• Multiple solving strategies such as maximizing
service-level fulfillment and/or throughput, or minimizing total operational supply chain costs
• “What if” simulation capabilities and comparisons Infor SCM Advanced Scheduler for process manufacturing is similarly all-encompassing, but deals with elements associated with short-term production horizons, such as balancing the requirement for smooth, efficient, and low-cost production runs against the inevitable need to manage volatile customer demand with minimum cost and disruption. Again, the application takes into account the real world of process manufacturing, with key attributes including the system’s ability to model and handle plant constraints and dependencies, as well as batch and continuous flow processing, shelf-life issues, and production sequencing trade-offs.
Since implementation of the Infor solution,
Organic Valley has been able to slow its
workforce growth while sustaining overall
revenue growth, resulting in a 37%
increase in sales per employee.
ADDRESSING SHELF-LIFE PROBLEMS.
Organic Valley Family of Farms, the largest US cooperative of organic farmers and one of the nation’s leading organic brands, is a prime example of a company needing demand and advanced planning systems. The company needed to consolidate its disparate systems into one enterprise solution to improve operating efficiencies and maintain the high quality of its line of perishable food products. In addition, the company wanted to better manage its annual growth rate of over 25%, which was becoming more challenging with increasing competition.
Organic Valley’s unique requirements stem from its focus on the food industry and its push business model, which guarantees that it will buy a specified quantity of products at a set price from member farmers. The cooperative then purchases production capacity from manufacturing partners located relatively close to its farmers, managing the supply process so materials arrive at the right plant at the scheduled production time.
The company needed not only standard process manufacturing capabilities and sophisticated advanced planning capabilities to support the push business model, but also a solution with plenty of flexibility and versatility to manage the dairy, produce, meat, and egg lines of business, all of which have different and unique requirements. To meet these extraordinary planning challenges, Organic Valley chose to leverage the solutions offered by Infor—Infor SCM Demand Planning and Infor SCM Advanced Planner, as well as its core enterprise resource planning solution, Infor ERP Adage. With the help of a consultant in the selection process, Organic Valley concluded that Infor’s applications addressed all of its business-specific requirements such as shelf-life management and expiration data management. The robust supply chain planning capabilities of Infor SCM Demand Planning also support Organic Valley’s unique supplier-driven forecasting requirements, and the combined solution meets its production, financial, and
reporting requirements.
With Infor ERP Adage and the supply chain planning solutions, the company has gained significant and far-reaching benefits. According to George Neill, director of IT at Organic Valley, “The Infor solution has enabled us to be much more agile on the technical side, and this has given us the ability to support our rapid business growth. We now have one integrated system to support all business processes across all of our lines of business.
“Since implementation of the Infor solution, Organic Valley has been able to slow its workforce growth while sustaining overall revenue growth, resulting in a 37% increase in sales per employee. There is an enormous amount of planning and organization that goes into establishing and maintaining our network of certified organic farmers and production facilities close to our farmers. The demand planning engine is proving ideal for helping us meet these challenging business requirements. We’re projecting a $2 million-per-year savings through improved supply chain planning and other
PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT.
Nowhere are the pressures of global competition and regulation felt more keenly than in the process
industries—especially in product development. It’s no secret that to survive, companies in the food and beverage, CPG, life sciences, and specialty chemicals sectors must develop new and enhanced profitable products faster and more efficiently than ever before. And they must do so while simultaneously focusing on compliance, cost reduction, and their supply chains at every stage. Doing that well is about right-first-time, holistic thinking, beginning with design. Success in the process industry requires a master database that not only enforces rigorous change management, but also integrates all departments via an overarching PLM process from finance to distribution.
Infor PLM Optiva provides the best of all worlds. This PLM system has a heritage of more than 10,000 users across 40-plus countries in companies such as Campina, Coca-Cola Company, Campbell Soup Company, GE Plastics, Hormel Foods, and Yves Rocher. But it’s also new—now an integral component of Infor’s Process Solutions end-to-end, process-specific system.
The system seamlessly integrates formula, material, label, packaging, and specification management, as well as testing and constraint-based validation, providing users with a single resource to manage all separate, yet interdependent aspects of new product development, introduction, marketing, production, distribution, and eventual phase-out. Existing users claim a wealth of benefits:
• Up to a 50% improvement in R&D productivity • A 30% increase in new products
• As much as a 70% reduction in product specification development time
• An 85% savings on labeling costs
• A 30% reduction in redundant packaging variants • Up to a 20% reduction in redundant formulas • A 45% reduction in direct materials
“These monumental improvements,” says Maarten Hagen, Infor PLM business consultant, “stem from the system’s ability not just to manage significant amounts of product data and documentation across functions, departments, and sites, but also to provide visibility into processes right out to manufacturing, with supply-chain-wide data sharing and collaboration, plus built-in validation and
regulatory compliance.
“Infor PLM Optiva works so well because it increases the availability of knowledge and enhances and automates workflows wherever they’re needed,” Hagen says. “It provides a single source of truth for all products that are data-driven, and it supports the whole process from concept to commercialization. And that’s just out-of-the-box; it also can be configured and implemented for any process business, no matter how large, without coding.”
PLM SUCCESS: MORE FOOD FOR THOUGHT.
Geertje Verhoeff, international application manager for Infor PLM Optiva at Netherlands-based dairy products
manufacturer Campina, says the value of the application comes from its centralized data source. She says that Infor PLM Optiva led to better information accuracy, quicker access to the information, a greater understanding of product lifecycles, and the means to manage them—both
proactively, anticipating demand, and reactively, dealing with issues as they arise.
Verhoeff cites the data search and manipulation tools that are so powerful, she says, that Campina can accomplish tasks in timescales of a much higher order. “Imagine that we had to respond to a market situation where it would be helpful to have information about the sugar percent levels across a product range,” says Verhoeff. “Before Infor PLM Optiva, this might take a couple of weeks, depending on the number of sites that held relevant information, and how quickly it could be accessed and collated. Now we can have that information in less than 30 minutes.”
And she says that the improvements are just as profound elsewhere. For instance, purchasing staff can now investigate the results of reducing the amount of a specific ingredient, or rapidly see the consequences of material shortages.
Hagen agrees, adding that Infor PLM Optiva users also benefit from being able to assess their exposure to regulatory issues, such as a genetically modified organism question over an ingredient, packaging, carbon tax, or recyclables, in a matter of minutes. “And at the other end of the process, Infor PLM Optiva enables users to check that products in development are suited to their production sites,” Hagen says. “The point is, with Infor PLM Optiva, they can manage their businesses proactively—boosting the bottom line, sustaining growth, and strengthening their competitiveness.”
ANOTHER INGREDIENT: ENTERPRISE
ASSET MANAGEMENT.
Unlike most other factors that can drag down a
manufacturer’s profitability, asset effectiveness is often not top of mind. The same is true for maintenance management, spares purchasing, and inventory controls. Why? Partly, the most common response to pressure on margins is to focus on sales growth and cost-cutting. Also, maintenance management systems often have been largely inaccessible, run as separate systems exclusively for engineering. In today’s ultra-competitive, asset-intensive process industries, that approach is simply inadequate.
Underperforming assets and associated departments have far-reaching and invariably negative consequences for overall corporate health. Not only can asset downtime disrupt production, reduce effective plant capacity, and risk quality, safety, and compliance key performance indicators (KPIs), it’s also one of the surest routes to scoring lower customer ratings. Additionally, inadequate maintenance can increase the cost of keeping assets and equipment from running at manufacturers’ peak efficiency, forcing companies into entirely avoidable spending on plant replacement. In process industries, these outcomes are neither needed
nor excusable.
MASSIVE INSTALLED BASE.
Infor EAM is now running maintenance at more than 10,000 organizations around the world, helping them to better manage, maintain, and track their assets, as well as drive better decision-making in maintenance, inventory, uptime,
The solution is an integral part of Infor’s end-to-end Process Solutions dedicated to the process industries and fully integrated with its process-centric ERP, supply chain management, and product lifecycle management systems. Previously, process manufacturers had two options: big monolithic applications driven from finance and ERP, or best-of-breed systems that had to be bolted on and supported.
In addition to being tightly integrated within the Infor Process Solutions, Infor EAM offers best-of-breed functionality on any platform through its heritage in asset management. This means that even supplier and cost codes, as part of materials and procurement processes, are stored in one place and visible to all departments. The traditional gap between engineers using ERP to request materials but not getting a commitment against POs, budgets, and contracts through finance becomes a thing of the past.
Other key features and functionality of Infor EAM that enable enterprises to respond quickly and effectively to today’s challenges include the ability to:
• Identify, track, locate, and analyze physical assets. With one centralized set of asset data such as location, cost history, permits, and documents, Infor EAM also helps to increase productivity and maximize asset life, with the same high level of functionality applying to maintenance, repairs, and operations.
• Support calibration, mobile working, and asset barcode management, with scorecards and KPIs that are built in. Companies no longer need to operate each site with separate engineering managers and different methods and systems for managing engineering stores, purchasing, and maintenance.
• Investigate various maintenance operations to develop uniform best practices across sites, including setting up rigorous processes for establishing consistent measures for KPIs and balanced scorecards.
In addition, Infor EAM addresses green issues such as resource conservation, greenhouse gas emission control, waste reduction, energy conservation, and environmentally negative materials reduction.
Infor Corporate Headquarters 13560 Morris Road Suite 4100 Alpharetta, Georgia 30004 USA Phone: +1 (800) 260 2640 www.infor.com
The result of all of these capabilities is significant cost savings and efficiency gains.
ABOUT INFOR.
Infor is a leading provider of business software and services, helping more than 70,000 customers in 164 countries improve operations and drive growth. To learn more about Infor, please visit www.infor.com.
