What’s the latest pulse on the Infor community? In this episode of RPI Tech Connect, RPI Partner Richard Leigh Stout breaks down the top five takeaways from our second annual State of Infor Community Survey. From increasing confidence in CloudSuite to the ongoing push for process optimization, reporting improvements, and the persistent training gap, we uncover what’s driving change in the Infor ecosystem.
Plus, we explore the growing anticipation for AI and what it means for the future workforce. Tune in for our exclusive Infor customer experience insights and how they could affect your business.
Interested in listening to this episode on another streaming platform? Check out our directories or watch the YouTube video below.
Meet Today’s Guest, Richard Leigh Stout
Recognized as a thought leader throughout the Infor CloudSuite and Lawson communities, Richard Leigh Stout joined RPI’s management team in 2014. He first served as the Director of our Technical Services practice, before taking the role of Director of Infor Service Delivery.
Mr. Stout has grown the practice with a focus on client satisfaction and the core values of RPI, completing hundreds of projects from interface flows to Lawson upgrades to full CloudSuite implementations. He draws on the experience of the whole team to architect elegant solutions that meet complex business challenges faced by RPI’s service industry clients.
Prior to joining the management team, he spent 10 years as an RPI Consultant, allowing him the opportunity to gain a wide-ranging familiarity with Infor implementation and optimization projects. In this role, he expanded his knowledge of workflow and process automation, document management, data management and reporting, integrations between Infor and other systems, web user interface development, as well as end user training and documentation.
Meet Your Host, Chris Arey
Chris Arey is a B2B marketing professional with nearly a decade of experience working in content creation, copywriting, SEO, website architecture, corporate branding, and social media. Beginning his career as an analyst before making a lateral move into marketing, he combines analytical thinking with creative flair—two fundamental qualities required in marketing.
With a Bachelor’s degree in English and certifications from the Digital Marketing Institute and HubSpot, Chris has spearheaded impactful content marketing initiatives, participated in corporate re-branding efforts, and collaborated with celebrity influencers. He has also worked with award-winning PR professionals to create unique, compelling campaigns that drove brand recognition and revenue growth for his previous employers.
Chris’ versatility is highlighted by his experience working across different industries, including HR, Tech, SaaS, and Consulting.
About RPI Tech Connect
RPI Tech Connect is the go-to podcast for catching up on the dynamic world of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Join us as we discuss the future of ERPs, covering everything from best practices and organizational change to seamless cloud migration and optimizing applications. Plus, we’ll share predictions and insights of what to expect in the future world of ERPs.
RPI Tech Connect delivers relevant, valuable information in a digestible format. Through candid, genuine conversations and stories from the world of consulting, we aim to provide actionable steps to help you elevate your organization’s ERP. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or new to the ERP scene, our podcast ensures you’re well-equipped for success.
Tune in as we explore tips and tricks in the field of ERP consulting each week and subscribe to RPI Tech Connect below.
Transcript
Chris Arey
The results are in from our State of the Info Community Survey. Tune in to find out our top five takeaways, as well as RPI’s exclusive insights for how they could affect your business.
Welcome back to RPI Tech Connect. I’m your host, Chris Arey. Today, we’re going to be diving into the results of our second annual State of the Infor Community survey. At RPI, we believe in fostering a well-informed and engaged Infor user community, and that’s why we conduct this survey; to better understand the experiences, challenges, and perspectives of service industry professionals. After reviewing the results, we’ve identified our top five takeaways.
Joining me today to talk all about them is RPI partner, Mr. Richard Leigh Stout. Stout, welcome back.
Richard Leigh Stout
Thanks, Chris. Thanks so much for having me again as a guest on your podcast. We had a great time talking about the survey results last year and I’m looking forward to diving in and talking about some of the trends and some of the differences.
Chris Arey
Awesome. I’m glad that your recurring segment has become an annual tradition for us here on RPI Tech Connect. Let’s go ahead and jump in. I think our first takeaway here centers around this increasing confidence in Infor CloudSuite. Over time, we’ve seen both anticipation and excitement for the product build consistently. So what stood out to you in the results this year? What can you share?
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, I think one of the first takeaways we see is the increased number of organizations that have plans to move to Cloud Suite, right? We’re seeing that 54% of respondents who are currently using Legacy Lawson as their financial system have plans to move to CloudSuite. And that same figure is 58 % for those using Lawson HR. That’s a nice jump.
It’s a number that we could probably take away a few conclusions from. You might be wondering, well, how do we know that? How do we get to that number?
Our survey starts with several demographic-related questions to build a profile for each respective respondent. This profile answers questions like: what software are they using today, what industry are they in, and what is their specific job function?
Using this information, we can narrow the pool down to those respondents who are currently Lawson users. We then targeted them by asking what their ERP platform plans were moving forward and gave them a few different options to pick from.
At this point, more than half are indicating that they have a plan to migrate to CloudSuite, which is great. We’re really happy to see this level of positive momentum.
Chris Arey
Thank you for sharing that. For those of you listening in, it’s very important to understand this survey and how it represents so many different members of the Infor community, right? You’ve got users running the Lawson system as well as those on the cloud, and the survey targets those two different audiences and all of the different functional area representatives within that, as well.
Okay, well thank you again for sharing. Why don’t we go ahead and jump into the second takeaway, which is this focus on process optimization. It’s a constant. What is the data telling you? What speaks to you?
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, so we asked respondents, what improvements have you made to your ERP system in the past year? And about 72 % checked “process optimizations”. And then another 50 % chose “deploying additional functionality”. So that’s pretty exciting. As a consultant, I’m all about that. I’m all about helping clients derive more value from the software and the systems that they own.
This could mean taking the time to optimize the systems that they have or maybe rolling out some additional functionality or capabilities that they’re already licensed for. Yeah, that’s why I come to work every day. That’s exciting stuff. What that shows me is that our customer base is committed to continuous improvement, right?
And this is not a technological thing, this is a cultural change or cultural shift, because, for a long time, organizations have sort of tied improvements to their software around these big monolithic upgrade cycles, right?
So 10 years ago, we would ask our clients a question like this and they’d say, yeah, I have a major system upgrade planned for 18 months out. Once that occurs, we plan to make some optimizations or gain additional functionality. That would’ve been the extent of the work done until the next major upgrade cycle arrived.
Now, we’re seeing a total change in mindset. At this stage, the CloudSuite software is updated pretty much continuously, with an update window every month and two major updates each year. What we’ve noticed is that these aren’t huge changes that are coming out there.
More so, there are a lot of incremental updates, meaning continuous improvements to the software. It’s up to all of us at RPI to adopt the shift to making incremental, smaller improvements more often as opposed to waiting years and then having a massive amount of change.
Seeing that our clients are already adapting to that change and approach, that’s pretty exciting.
Chris Arey
Yeah, I really like this mindset of continuous improvement too. I saw something recently that read: little by little makes a little a lot over time. It sounds like that’s exactly what’s happening here.
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah. There’s a tagline that some of my coworkers used to have in their email and it was that incremental improvement is better than, you know, postponed change. Yeah.
Chris Arey
Okay, yeah. Nice, nice. A similar type of thing. Question for you though. What kind of optimizations are we talking about here? You mentioned some that are part of Infor CloudSuite’s regular maintenance process, but what are the other things that you’re seeing that people are doing?
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, there are a few things that are going on here. We’re seeing some changes to workflows. We’re seeing an increase in reporting, which we’re going to talk about next. I think the general trend here is we have a large number of Infor users out there who are relatively new to the CloudSuite platform, meaning that their implementation took place within the past three years or so.
Now that period is when they’re putting to practical use some of the things that were developed during the implementation project. Using interfaces as an example: everybody who goes live with Cloud Suite is going live with a certain number of interfaces that have been designed and tested as part of the project.
Fast forward a year after Go-Live and all of a sudden, you have a lot of great history of running real-life data through those interfaces. As a result, you’re starting to see the same kinds of exceptions popping up over and over. That allows you to start mitigating said exceptions, right? Once you keep running into the same data error with this interface repeatedly, it’s time to go back and make the necessary adaptations to the interface.
Maybe it can be handled completely via automation, or by reducing the amount of hard errors. Whatever the approach may be, we see a lot of organizations going back and restructuring their interfaces based on the actual mileage that they’re getting out of them.
Chris Arey
Nice. Based on what I’m hearing, post-Go-Live, that day two phase is a great opportunity to revisit some of these processes, reports, and interfaces to begin some of these optimizations. Is that right?
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, of course. mean, hindsight’s always 20-20, right? Once you get into a system, your mindset changes a little bit from the pre-implementation phase. Accumulating real-world data and seeing how that flows through the system that you just built is naturally going to lead to some opportunity to kind of rethink, well, wait, why did we do it this way? Or, we didn’t anticipate this, let’s see if we can put something in place.
Chris Arey
Yeah. Well, it’s great to see that the data confirms this truth as well, as 72 % of respondents made optimizations to their system in the past year. That’s a nice number.
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, for sure. The total number of CloudSuite users has increased year over year too, which supports that as well. Half of our respondents last year were already on Cloud Suite, and here we’re well over 60%. Of course, we think that trend is going to continue in that direction as more of our client base transitions to the latest cloud offering.
Chris Arey
Nice. Cool. Thank you. So now we’re going to move into takeaway number three, which I think is a big one: this idea of reporting. As we talked about a year ago, it was an area where organizations wanted to see some improvement. So fast forward a year. Here we are. What does the data show?
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, the data does show a marked improvement in user satisfaction with reporting, which was identified as a major weakness last year. And honestly, that wasn’t really news, right? I think that we all kind of knew that. Infor had already acknowledged that reporting was a weakness and was already taking a lot of steps to close that gap.
Our survey this year has 41 % showing or citing reporting as a weakness. That is a decrease from last year’s number, which is great. Well, I should say the decrease is great. The actual number we’re at is still unsatisfactory, and we want to see that number go down significantly before we can say we’ve solved that problem.
Chris Arey
It’s good to see that things are going in the right direction. What do you believe are some of the reasons for driving that improvement?
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, there are a few factors here. Infor has rolled out enhancements like the report catalog and the consolidated web apps, making reports more accessible, right? In the past, there have been certain reports in the system that have been difficult to access on a day-to-day basis. Raising the visibility of said reports and getting them in front of the right people is super important.
And that’s just one of the innovations coming out from Infor, because as I said, they have identified reporting as a major area of focus. As a result, we are seeing a lot of system capabilities that are closing these gaps. Another one is greater adoption of the GL Report Designer, which is going to reduce your reliance on customer reporting.
And then, of course, as organizations are a little bit more mature on the platform, they become more familiar with the reports and the tools available. In short, they become more adept at using the resources at their disposal.
Chris Arey
It sounds like better tools and greater user adoption are kind of working together here to move the needle in the right direction for reporting usage.
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, for sure. That’s just what’s been happening from an Infor perspective. In the past, there has understandably been a focus on what software capabilities are readily available to you directly following implementation, but we have also seen a change in our client base’s mindset, as they begin to look outside of the box. For example, determining which item from the toolset delivered from the software vendor used to create reports.
But moving on, I think our customers are getting more savvy. They’re looking at what general enterprise reporting tools they can use to weave Infor data into their enterprise, potentially to replicate it in a data warehouse or a different cloud-based reporting tool, allowing it to be useful on other platforms.
This allows us to leverage the greater developmental capabilities of certain systems while also warehousing data from other systems that we want to all pull together. So that’s been a big improvement as well.
Chris Arey
It’s nice when the software you have out of the box works the way you want it to, but it sounds like customers are becoming a little more self-sufficient here and recognizing that other solutions may integrate well and fill those gaps for the reporting needs.
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Arey
So the fourth takeaway is a new question from this year’s survey. We wanted to find out what organizations and Infor users want to see more of in the community in terms of events. And it seems like training was something that was highly sought after. So Stout, what can you share with us?
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, that’s an interesting one, right? You asked, what would you like to see the Infor community host more of?
And by far the top response was some form of training, right?
Chris Arey
Yeah.
Richard Leigh Stout
So there’s maybe a bit of a paradox, maybe a little bit of contradictory data here. The reason I say that is because when we asked, know, what improvements have you made to your ERP system, only 36 % brought training into the equation.
So only a third of those respondents had engaged in training over the past year.
Chris Arey
It’s interesting because only around 30 % of organizations invested in it, yet this demand for it still exists. People want to see more of it. I wonder, what is the reason that there is a disconnect, or maybe they go together? What’s the story there?
Richard Leigh Stout
Could it be a cause and effect? I mean, we see that 36 % of respondents engaged in some kind of training last year, but 62 % would like to have available more training. Is there not enough training offered?
Chris Arey
Mm-hmm. Yes, that’s the question.
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah. And I think that would be a really interesting conclusion here. And I wonder what our audience might make of that as well.
Chris Arey
Yeah, for those of you listening in, there’s a request for more training, but folks aren’t investing enough in training. Why do think that is? You can let us know.
Email us at podcast@rpic.com or drop a comment on LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you. But yeah, I think it’s one of our top five takeaways. It’s one that I wouldn’t say is inconclusive, but it’s a mystery.
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, you know, that’s the thing I love about the survey actually; sometimes we ask these questions that present results we can tie together, or they might not.
It’s kind of left up to us to kind of interpret the data, as no universal truths are coming out of this survey. Either way, RPI has got you covered, right? People have asked for more training events, and I think that we’ve certainly stepped up to try and fill that gap.
RPI offers a ton of different training in various venues and different forms, right? Because, you know, training, training is not all the same. I think training is most effective when it’s catered towards the learner. Different people learn in different ways. Different people are coming at this from different places.
Chris Arey
Yeah.
Richard Leigh Stout
If we even just talk about the method of the training, we’re offering classroom training. Right now we’ve got an in-person bootcamp coming up a little bit later this year. Those have been super popular. For some people that works well. Especially this bootcamp style where it’s a little bit more condensed, you’re hitting a lot of topics and it’s like very intensive, right?
That style has been a hit here, but I know it’s not for everybody, right? As you know, not everybody is able to travel and we don’t want to deprive them the opportunity to receive training.
That’s why we do a lot of virtual training. Something that we definitely learned the hard way throughout the pandemic is the way that you execute virtual training is just really different than the way that you do in-person training.
Chris Arey
Mm-mm.
Richard Leigh Stout
However, I think we have that delivery approach pretty well refined at this point. I think we know how to deliver virtual training effectively as well. For those learners that know that’s the best fit for them, we offer a set of classes on that avenue.
Chris Arey
I’m really happy you talked about the way that RPI is delivering different types of training experiences. We had a separate conversation with Michaela and Devin Shepherd from Infor talking about the event landscape for 2025 and how both Infor and RPI are working together to kind of meet folks where they are.
Understanding that, you know, there might be limitations to physically traveling somewhere or a certain topic might lend itself better to a virtual training room type thing. I thank you for mentioning that. And it’s also exciting for us to see that in this data that people have spoken and they want more training events put together.
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah. And that’s our call to action. So we shall abide.
Chris Arey
Yes. Cool. So let’s get into our final takeaway here. It wouldn’t be a business tech podcast if we didn’t talk about AI, so as you might expect, our last takeaway involves artificial intelligence. More specifically, we wanted to know how the Infor user base and community are feeling about it. From your perspective, what did the data show?
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, I think the top line question here is we asked, do you use AI as part of your job today? Only 20 % answered yes to that one. That’s not a huge surprise to me.
I didn’t expect a lot of our our client base to say that AI is a big part of their job, because, honestly, it hasn’t made a huge impact on the systems we use daily outside of certain niche applications, such as AP data capture for invoice automation.
That is a process that’s featured an AI component for a long time and is pretty well established.
Some of the flashier AI applications that we see in personal usage are related to content creation or summarization, right? Chat GPT can generate a bunch of text for that purpose or can summarize it for me so I can better absorb it or understand it quicker.
That’s not a use case that is super applicable to most of the ways that we use Infor software, right? Like our jobs don’t revolve around a wall of text going in or out, right?
Given this, using large language models within our industries, or our business roles might not be the most sensible application. And I think that’s fine, right?
The really interesting thing here, I think, lies in these summary results. We’ve got 20 % of respondents saying they use AI now, right? So that means about, you know, four-fifths are not using AI, but everybody has some level of expectation about how AI is gonna impact their job, right? We asked, how do you expect AI to change your ERP usage going forward?
Chris Arey
Yeah.
Richard Leigh Stout
Everybody has some idea, right? They expect this to be coming and they expect change. I think the most interesting one is that 40 % of respondents said they expect AI will help streamline the decision-making process. And I do think that’s a big one. I’m part of that 40%. I’m a believer there.
Chris Arey
That’s big.
Richard Leigh Stout
Because I think that the next level of practical AI usage is the ability to surface insights from data that’s going to help streamline decision-making. So rather than having to write all these reports and draw our conclusions, let’s let the AI summarize all the data that’s in the system and point us to trends or what we should focus on. From there, you’ll be able to prioritize your time based on what is going to be the most impactful and yield the most amount of insight.
Chris Arey
Yeah.
Richard Leigh Stout
You know, I hope to keep this question on the survey year after year. I’m sure that that number is going to go up. As much hype as we hear about AI, you know, we do work in back office systems,which lag a bit in comparison to revenue-oriented or customer-facing systems, right? And
I think that’s what we want to keep an eye on. That’ll be the indicator, right? I would say if we want to know what’s coming in the world of AI for enterprise business, keep an eye on what’s happening with your customer-facing or revenue-generating systems. Those are probably going to get a bit more invested in AI.
They’re going to be a little bit more progressive and see what’s working out there and see maybe what’s not working out so well.
And that’ll help you make some better choices, I think, in terms of where to invest in the back office and know what’s going to be easy to adopt and what will have an impact versus what will not.
Chris Arey
It sounds as though it’s also a good indicator of what’s like what’s coming down the pipeline, right?
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That being said, if there’s a huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence, it’s probably not going to display itself first in your financial management system.
Chris Arey
That makes sense. And managing expectations here, I’m glad you mentioned that. It’s not super surprising that only 20% report using it currently, but as you said, the anticipation, hype, & expectation that it will grow in the future is there in multiple different capacities. It’s only a matter of time, it seems.
For those of you tuning in, we are going to have a separate discussion on AI, diving deeper with Melissa Olson, so stay tuned for that. That does conclude our top five takeaways for this year’s State of the Infor Community Survey. If you’d like to explore the full results and our insights, including the infographic, we encourage you to check out our website and blog post, which will include all of that information.
But before we close out, you might remember from last year that I like to ask my guests if they have one actionable takeaway for those listening. I’d love to hear what can you share with those listening in today!
Richard Leigh Stout
Yeah, I think this year the biggest takeaway that I see, looking at people’s responses, is that they feel as though they’re a member of a community, right? Whether you’re using Infor CloudSuite, Lawson, or some other system, there are other people who kind of fit your demographic.
There are other people in your same industry. There are other people in your same job role. We know this, right? Because we asked all those questions, right? And there are not a ton of outliers here based on these survey results, right?
I think there are definitely some groups here. And if you’re currently a CloudSuite user, guess what? There are a ton of other Cloud Suite users here and they’re reporting the same kinds of challenges, right? They’re also reporting that they’re working on the same kinds of things.
If you’re currently a Lawson user, there are a lot of Lawson users out there too. And they are also collectively trying to figure out what’s coming up next. We’re also looking at our direction, and a lot of us are looking at moving from Lawson to Cloud Suite.
And our survey says there are a lot of organizations that have gone through that and can offer up anecdotes as to what that experience was like for them. So for me, the top takeaway here is you want to take advantage of this community. You want to leverage this community aspect, stay engaged, and learn from your community peers, right?
Get together, offer what’s working for you, what your challenges may be, and hear the same from your peers. There are a few different ways that you can do that. In addition to the community that we try to foster here, RPI, Infor has a lot of different channels through which you could engage in communication.
They have regular meetings where they talk about what’s coming out in system updates, and you can use those to meet other people and hear what other people’s concerns are. You can connect with a regional user group. Even if you can’t attend one in person, you can talk to people online who are sort of within your region.
And then, of course, there’s the big national event, Infor Connect, that’s going to be in Dallas this year. We’re all really excited to be going to that. We think that’s a valuable event and that’s a great way for our Infor customer base to make in-person connections, people that you can stay in touch with after the conference.
Chris Arey
I appreciate you saying that. That’s part of the reason why we did this survey, right? So that people know that there are others in similar situations that they are. They can learn from each other, stay informed, and just really create a stronger community.
I appreciate that stuff. That’s a great takeaway. Well, thank you again for hopping on here. It’s been a pleasure. And for those of you listening in, if you have any questions or you want to learn more about our survey, we invite you to contact us at podcast@rpic.com. Again, that’s podcast@rpic.com. Until next time, this is RPI Tech Connect. Take care.
Richard Leigh Stout
Thank you.
