Company Announcement - Infor, the industry cloud company, has announced Infor M3 version 13.3, delivering deep industry-specific functionality to cover a wide-range of unique business needs. Infor M3 is a comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution featuring core processes to manage customer service, manufacturing operations, financials, supply chain and equipment management. Infor M3, is the hub for a number of industry suites and provides customers with broad and deep core functionality and the integration with other best in class applications that they need to successfully manage their enterprise. Servicing the food & beverage, fashion, distribution, equipment, and process manufacturing industries, Infor M3 empowers organisations to adapt to the shifting demands of their specific industry. The ERP is built to service organisations of all sizes and is configurable to fit the individual business needs of each customer.

Infor M3 13.3 is the second release built on the 13.x infrastructure model, Infor’s new and improved update method aids in delivering new and improved functionality without the need for major upgrade projects. Simplified, regular updates make it easier for Infor M3 customers to benefit from the latest functionality and continuously improve their processes. Infor M3 13.3 delivers more than 200 improvements and resulting in a total of over 1,200 application-level enhancements since the previous 10.1 version was released. Infor M3 is a global solution that, with the addition of Turkey and Russia in this latest version, now supports 43 countries and 18 languages.

Major enhancements to the Infor M3 solution in version 13.3 include an updated Quality Management module, which now features improved support for shipment tests and configurable Certificates of Analysis. The addition of the Grower Contract Management module further supports food & beverage customers that procure harvested raw materials from growers and farmers. For fashion customers, the Infor M3 improvements have focused on increasing efficiency of finished goods allocation, mass maintenance and matrix improvements. Equipment customers will be able to take advantage of improvements in the rental, service, equipment and parts sales processes plus the new project portal. Distribution customers will also see improved support for Target Buying in the procurement process, plus our Trade promotion management for distributors is further enhanced with additional rebate methods.

Kavli Holding AS, [an international producer and distributor of food and beverage products] is among the first Infor customers planning to deploy Infor M3 13.3. "At Kavli we are always looking for opportunities to enhance the processes across our organisation. The upgrade to version 13.3 will contribute substantially to this continual improvement. The most important factor for our production is robustness.  We operate every hour of every day to very strict SLAs and our ERP must facilitate our exacting standards,” said Tom In’t Veen, IT director, Kavli Holding AS. “The new Graphical Lot Tracker will help enable us to better identify where ingredients or products are at any one time, supporting food safety and traceability processes that protect consumers. The new Quality Management Module will enable each of our sites to report on the information gained from testing samples consistently and with less work to manually load data.  Lastly, the upgrade will improve the integration with our Infor Optiva PLM system to further drive efficiency for Kavli.”

The latest version of the Infor M3 solution is fully Infor 10x enabled and includes Infor ION®, a purpose-built middleware and Infor Ming.le™, a collaborative social business platform. The release utilises the H5 thin client, which further enhances collaboration and enables data to be easily exported to popular business applications such as Microsoft Excel and helps simply apply scripting capabilities to deliver a well-rounded consumer grade user experience. The addition of the Web Mashup software development kit (SDK) and new configuration capabilities also help customers tailor the user experience down to the role or individual level. This directly benefits the customer by avoiding the need for modifications by providing tooling for personalisation of an Infor M3 solution in a manner that does not impact the ability and ease of upgrades in the future (unlike many other ERP systems where customer-specific customisations make upgrading difficult if not impossible). The solution is outfitted with Infor M3 Analytics and mobility, which provides real-time business intelligence to the workforce at anytime, anywhere.

The latest Infor M3 solution now features an open source based Linux platform as a deployment choice to reduce total cost of ownership for customers.

“At Infor, it is our job to make our customer’s lives easier. With our continuous updates to Infor M3, we are providing customers the ability to do more work, more efficiently,” said John Gledhill, global director, M3 Product Management, Infor. “Infor M3 version 13.3 allows our customers to improve their lines of business without completely overhauling their existing hardware. This update is an example of our dedication to creating software that works better and drives innovation, while focusing on our key industries to better serve all of our customers.”