The Ultimate Guide to Infor CloudSuite Pre-Planning

By: Keith Wayland    May 14, 2024

Organizations are increasingly evaluating when to migrate to Infor CloudSuite. Savvy employers keen on ensuring a successful implementation should take a proactive approach as the project is no easy undertaking.

In fact, according to the 2021 Gartner ERP, Procurement, HCM, and Financial Survey, 42% of respondents say they “struggle with Cloud ERP strategies because of their inability to cover the complexity of functional business needs.” That same report also finds that nearly 70% of respondents have an ERP strategy that does not align with their business objectives.

Due to the many moving parts and disruptions to daily business practices, migrating critical business data over to Infor’s CloudSuite can be challenging, but it’s most certainly a worthwhile effort. With so much to consider before, during, and post implementation, your business must act strategically and that means taking action prior to kicking off the project.

To alleviate difficulties and ensure greater success with cloud ERP solutions, like Infor’s CloudSuite, organizations should conduct a pre-planning exercise.

In this post, we’ll explain what Infor CloudSuite pre-planning is, why it’s beneficial, and how to perform the series of steps ahead of an implementation.

What is Infor CloudSuite Pre-Planning?

Pre-planning is an optional exercise that can significantly improve the success of a CloudSuite project. It occurs before a CloudSuite engagement and can help set up the necessary infrastructure for the implementation. Pre-planning also helps determine the breadth of the project, which can help organizations determine if they have the necessary resources to oversee the implementation or if they need additional support from a third party.

As we dive into the specifics of pre-planning it’s important to make clear the difference between pre-planning and planning, as the two play different roles and do not serve as substitutes for one another.

In short, pre-planning helps organizations establish the budget, timeline, and scope for an implementation project. It also provides stakeholders with the opportunity to align around project goals and objectives.

Planning on the other hand, is a project phase that occurs at the beginning of an engagement and helps set up necessary infrastructure for the CloudSuite implementation.

What is the Purpose of Pre-Planning for Infor CloudSuite?

In addition to understanding the scope and timeline of your implementation, pre-planning offers many other benefits. For one, it can help identify potential constraints that may slow the implementation or impede business processes, and becoming aware of these roadblocks before beginning can help you reduce the risk of project failure and allow you to more effectively allocate time and resources.

Remember, when you begin the CloudSuite implementation project, you’re setting the foundation for your organization’s back-office infrastructure for the next 20 to 25 years.

Beyond the benefits mentioned above, pre-planning can help your team achieve two primary objectives.

1. Prepare your organization for a CloudSuite implementation:

A CloudSuite implementation requires engagement from business users. And even though it will interrupt their everyday jobs, it’s for good reason as it will ensure many operational improvements down the road.

Besides demonstrating organizational transparency, this also helps stakeholders understand what the project is, how it will benefit the organization, and what wins they have to look forward to. Essentially, pre-planning can showcase many quality-of-life improvements that everyone on the team can expect after completing the CloudSuite implementation project.

2. Prioritize what can be taken on during the initial implementation phase:

The second objective relates to determining the necessary project scope for a successful go-live. It requires understanding the complexity of all the different areas, both in terms of your business process and reports, interfaces, customizations, and extensions (RICE) inventory components, before you determine the best way to proceed.

This objective helps organizations decide how much time and resource availability they can allocate toward the project work versus how much support they might need from a partner. As such, it helps organizations establish realistic goals around what can be done within the allowed time frame.

Preparing for an RPI Pre-Planning Event (aka Pre-Pre-Planning)

A question we often get from clients is, “What should we do to prepare for an RPI pre-planning event?” Like planning for a CloudSuite implementation, there are several things your organization can do prior to the pre-planning exercise. Below we identify four essential steps to take:

1. Document your current processes: The better you know your current processes and pain points, the better you can articulate them to a consultant. Knowing this information up front can set you up for success from the beginning instead of both RPI and your group having to discover it together at the time of the engagement. Plus, knowing how processes execute provides partners ample time to prepare for any unique nuances ahead of time and ensure a smoother implementation.
2. Clean up your data: As the saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out” and it couldn’t be any truer when it comes to migrating decades worth of business data. The better your ERP data quality, the better off you’ll be, regardless of whether you’re using migration tools or converting the data.
3. Gather technical documentation: On the technical side, it’s also great to have documentation on all client interfaces. Before pre-planning, you should reach out to any other entities, such as benefits providers, and make sure the technical document requirements are stored in a central location. This will ensure data is stored correctly when migrating from host to target locations.
4. Familiarize yourself with CloudSuite: It’s never too early to start educating your business on CloudSuite. Infor has released a wealth of material, and RPI has over 150 webinars recorded discussing a variety of related topics. Be sure to explore resources that focus on your exact needs. Of course, consultants like RPI can make specific recommendations based on a person’s role in an organization, and their areas of interest.

Project Scope & Approach for a Pre-Planning Event

After taking steps to prepare your data systems for the pre-planning event, it’s time to discuss the project scope and approach of the pre-planning event.

At RPI, we begin this phase with a discovery exercise. During this process, we focus on understanding how your organization has made use of Lawson, or other third-party on-premise systems whose functionality will impact the move to CloudSuite.

During the project scoping phase, we break down business process requirements, focusing on each of the business functions primarily in use within Lawson and evaluate their alignment with the functionality of CloudSuite. This allows us to determine which processes will require extra effort and which will be more straightforward to produce, based on the scale of standard functionality.

If the CloudSuite application does not deliver the ability to execute a business process right out of the box with minimal configuration, our consultants will determine whether configuration review and other changes are required, which means more time spent during the design and build phases. For processes that do not accommodate out-of-the-box or built-in capability, we look for opportunities to change the way an organization is doing things and help them fully make use of the advantages of CloudSuite.

Another major factor of pre-planning is reporting. Since the reporting and analytics function in CloudSuite is different from Lawson, we evaluate an organization’s reporting needs and determine what critical data needs must be available on day one of go-live. This includes estimating the work effort required to develop reports, such as those produced annually with specific formats.

Understanding how the phasing will appear to each organization is also important. We recommend a staggered approach that allows the organization to digest the system over time, which is especially important for IT teams as they assist in the implementation process.

The goal of the pre-planning project and scope phases is to evaluate the level of work required for the CloudSuite implementation and to determine what critical data needs must be available on day one of go-live. If your organization is pursuing the effort on its own, be sure to give special attention to the aforementioned items.

What to Expect Post Pre-Planning

Once an RPI pre-planning CloudSuite implementation exercise is completed, organizations should document their plans and insights. If partnering with a leading consultant like RPI, you can expect the following deliverables:

Assessment executive summary: The summary is essentially the first opportunity to show the results of the time, work, and resources that the combined teams have put in as well as outline the path forward. This information can be especially useful for stakeholders who need to obtain executive weight behind the initiative. A CloudSuite implementation is important, but it needs to be balanced against many other major organizational projects at the same time and the executive summary provides a good overview of what to expect.

Project scope and approach: This detailed report includes specifics pertaining to the organizational profile as well as documents collected during the discovery period. This information forms the narrative of how the Infor application is used, how well it is meeting your current needs, and, on the other hand, any other noticeable gaps that we can close with the new CloudSuite solution.

Project roadmap: The roadmap developed during pre-planning details more accurate budgetary estimates and capital planning. One thing to expect from the roadmap are the costs associated with software licensing, including Infor SaaS licensing, as well as the change from on-premise or perpetual licensing. In addition, the roadmap will highlight any additional costs associated with any third-party software subscriptions or licenses that could potentially end because their functionality is provided by CloudSuite.

RICE Inventory: The RICE inventory will detail a list of priorities ahead of the implementation, as well as what items must be completed by time of go-live and what can wait until additional resources and time permit. Your RICE inventory will also include estimates for how resource intensive development work is and identify any components they will be replaced by standard-out-of-the-box functionality.

Get Started with RPI Pre-Planning

Now that you have a high-level understanding of a CloudSuite pre-planning engagement and RPI Consultants’ process for ensuring successful implementation, contact us now to learn how we can further assist you with this project.

Our Pre-Planning service is a highly structured four-to-eight-week engagement consisting of workshops, stakeholder meetings, and discovery that is designed to assist customers in preparing for a successful CloudSuite migration. Throughout this process, we help teams identify the big-ticket items that will be focal points during the project as well as define the scope and timeline for the implementation.

If you have any questions or would like more information regarding an assessment for your organization ahead of a CloudSuite implementation, contact us below.