Looking to meet its commitment to customers as well as expand its customer base, enterprise applications purveyor Infor today unveiled an intermediate "feature pack" upgrade to its ERP LN suite for discrete manufacturers.
Most of the 30 or so new features in LN Feature Pack 3 were developed as a direct result of customer feedback, according to the vendor. New, customer-suggested features, said Mike Frichol, Infor's vice president of global industry and product marketing, include functions that enable additional cycle count, inventory adjustments, invoice sorting, multiple purchase orders aggregation, and crosslink between purchase and sales orders, as well as third-party logistics support for freight management applications.
The main goal of the intermediate feature pack upgrade, Frichol told Managing Automation, is to reinforce Infor's commitment to continue to enrich the LN product line -- which runs on Microsoft Windows and Unix platforms -- with extended support, maintenance, and functional enhancements.
LN Feature Pack 3 also provides support for reverse logistics, a process that enables manufacturers to take material back from customers, send temporary or permanent replacements, put unserviceable equipment on stock, and refurbish returned products individually or in batch, as per the demand, while keeping track of the products' lifecycle history and status.
Other features, developed in concert with industry trends, include support for hazardous materials regulations such as Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS), which electrical component manufacturers must adhere to. The feature pack also enables customers to enter transactions through a bar code interface for real-time upload into the system, Frichol said.
Infor's incremental feature pack upgrade does not require current users of LN 6.1 -- the last major upgrade to the product, made two years ago when it was owned by SSA Global -- to reinstall the software, and provides a streamlined way for current users to access new functions without having to perform a major upgrade. Ease of implementation improvements are in line with Infor's stated roadmap, according to Jane Barrett, research director for industrial manufacturing at AMR Research.
Barrett said that it is increasingly essential for Infor -- which is positioning LN as a competitor to SAP and Oracle in the discrete global automotive, industry machinery, and aerospace and defense markets -- to articulate a clear product roadmap to convince customers and prospects to invest in LN. The fact that the feature pack was delivered on time is a good sign that Infor is meeting that commitment, Barrett noted.
Current customers running an older version of LN -- originally offered by Baan Company before the software changed hands through various acquisitions -- would have to upgrade to ERP LN 6.1 to get the new functionality offered in the service pack. But Barrett noted that such customers, some of whom may have been waiting to upgrade based on Infor's plans for the product, might now feel comfortable enough to make the investment.
Infor has further prepared such customers to upgrade by providing clearly defined upgrade paths and data migration tools to ease the transition when they're ready to do so, Frichol told Managing Automation.
Barrett speculated that a future incremental product release of LN will need to include strong financial functionality in order to compete with SAP and Oracle.
Frichol noted that LN, which is targeted at discrete industries with large, complex projects like aerospace and defense and high-tech componentry and whose largest markets are in Europe and Asia, complements Infor's other ERP offerings for discrete manufacturers, including SyteLine, used mostly by North American manufacturers in shorter, repetitive industries like metal fabrication; and Visual, targeted at the lower end of the market and sold mostly through Infor's channel partners.