Inside the Infor Velocity Summit: Exploring Process Mining, Mongoose, and More

By: RPI Tech Connect   October 22, 2024

The first-ever Infor Velocity Summit showcased cutting-edge tech innovations, from Generative AI to Infor Process Mining. Join host Chris Arey and RPI Principal Technical Consultant Jeremy Stoltzfus as they recap key highlights, explore the differences between Mongoose and Config Console, and share actionable insights for getting the most out of new technologies. Plus, find out how attending events like Velocity benefits RPI’s clients by keeping them ahead of the curve.

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Meet Today’s Guest, Jeremy Stoltzfus

Jeremy Stoltzfus is a Principal Technical Consultant who has been with RPI since January of 2017. Jeremy is a Certified Infor Developer with technology expertise on both Windows/MS-SQL and Unix/Oracle on-premise and Cloud platforms.

Jeremy’s focus on process improvement within multiple Infor CloudSuite configurations, security, development, upgrade, and data conversion projects has helped Infor clients make the most of their ERP investment. He ensures that a client’s business requirements can be achieved using Infor CloudSuite solutions.

Throughout his career with RPI, Jeremy has worked as a technical consultant, integration architect, systems analyst, programmer, and technical lead for various implementation and optimization projects. Jeremy is also very involved with RPI’s training initiatives and enjoys teaching multi-day workshops and presenting webinars and at Infor user groups.

Prior to joining RPI, Jeremy worked as an Infor Lawson system administrator for 15 years where he led significant upgrade and development efforts. He has always been an active participant in the Infor Lawson community.

Meet Your Host, Chris Arey

Chris Arey is an experienced B2B marketing professional with nearly a decade of 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 principles 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 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
Infor Process Mining, GenAI, Mongoose, and more. The Infor Velocity Summit was nothing short of innovative. In this episode, we’ll break down our key takeaways and highlight the value of attending events like this one.

Welcome to RPI Tech Connect. I’m your host, Chris Aery. And today we’re diving into our recap of the Infor Velocity Summit in Las Vegas. This event was the first of its kind and it brought together some of the most exciting updates in Infor’s tech landscape. Joining me today to unpack everything we learned is RPI Principal Technical Consultant, Jeremy Stoltzfus. Jeremy, welcome back to the show.

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Thanks Chris.

Chris Arey
Happy to have you here, For those that are unfamiliar with the famous Jeremy, would you mind sharing a little bit about yourself?

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Sure. Yeah, my name’s Jeremy Stoltzfus. I have been in the Infor Lawson space for a little over 20 years now. So started way back in Lawson version seven, system admin and just over the years, working on the client side and then joining RPI in 2017.

Chris Arey
Well, I know that I speak for everybody that you are a great consultant and you know everything there is to know about technical things in the Infor Lawson space. So thank you again for joining me today. So I think a great place to start with this Infor Velocity Summit recap is to kind of talk about the event as a whole. This was the first of its kind. And so I’m wondering from your perspective, what was this all about? What did they talk about?

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I mean, it kind of was the first of its kind. It was a kind of a new iteration of what Infor slash Lawson used to do in the past, right? Past there was Q and then there was Inforum. You know, the event is really just to educate the user base and the user population of their software and to keep people informed as far as what’s happening in the software. And being able to leverage their investment better.

Chris Arey
That sounds great. I know that there were a handful of RPIers who joined you at the conference. So I’m curious to hear, over those, I guess, two days of actual conferencing, and then they had some specific courses for certain applications, is that right? Technical?

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Yeah, so the conference itself for general audience was two days and then the day before the conference started was a tech day. So it was focused on some of the technology from a support, from a development type perspective.

Chris Arey
Okay, very cool. I’m sure then that you got a probably a little more in-depth view at what’s coming in down the pipeline then. So then let’s pivot here and I’m hoping you can maybe share with me what were the big reveals from this summit? What do we have to look forward to? What can we start using now? Yeah, what’s the scoop?

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Yeah, sure. So yeah, being a technical consultant, my focus when I attend these events is always like, well, what can I get out of this for my day-to-day job, right? How can I make my job better? At the end of the day, my job as a consultant is to implement or configure or assist customers with their implementations, whether it’s live, post-go live, or during an implementation.

So I’m always looking for pieces and…tricks and tools and things that I can take away. Some of the big, the major themes, of course, GenAI is everywhere, right? Everybody’s kind of talking about AI, artificial intelligence, and what can it do for me? You can’t really go anywhere anymore without hearing something about it. So there was a ton of talk about that. It’s…

It’s not a matter of, can this technology be used? It’s really kind of a matter of, how can we leverage AI within an ERP software package, right? So what are some of the gains that we can get out of that?

Again, my focus is more about implementation or helping customers excel in their…project or if they’re live already. So I look at for some of those other tools. Another eye-opening piece for me was the Mongoose development platform. So it’s basically a platform for custom app development within the M4 ecosystem. So all right there within your tenant, within the existing infrastructure that you as a customer already own and maintain as part of your investment.

Chris Arey
Very cool.

Jeremy Stoltzfus
And then the other kind of interesting thing for me was this tool called process mining, right? Looking at how a customer is using the system and are they aligning with best practice? their processes, do their processes branch all over the place, right? Or do they align? And what are those variations and how do they really affect how an organization may run their business.

Chris Arey
Yeah, those all sound like really great additions to the Infor lineup. And I really like how you framed the GenAI there. It’s the world we live in now that AI is constantly talked about, constantly being used, and there’s always a better way to do it.

But you put it in this context of how do you use it within your ERP? And it sounds like Infor is trying to make that easier by instituting, I think, its GenAI Assistant, which is an application, I think, within the system that you can use to like write requisitions or to help with receipts and things of that nature. So did they, premier sessions, did they share anything in addition to that or?

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Yeah, I mean, and it’s also really kind of used for, you know, think about in a normal household, right? So like I’m here at my home and I’m getting ready for the day and I ask my Google assistant what the weather is, right? And it helps me, right? That’s something I do every day, right? And so like, it’s even more of a conversation type of thing. And it sounds weird to say that you’re having a conversation with your ERP system.

Chris Arey
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Stoltzfus
But it’s designed to make it a little bit more user-friendly and intuitive. I, as a casual end user who want to know the status of a particular invoice, I may only go into the system once a month or very infrequently. And so for me to try to navigate and remember how to get to that information can be challenging. But it’s really, OK, hey, I’m looking for this invoice.

Chris Arey
Yeah.

Jeremy Stoltzfus
And, okay, what’s the status of it? Okay, well, why isn’t the requisition or why isn’t the PO created yet? Or, you know, all of those things where you can kind of have that conversation with the system and allow the system to kind of answer those questions for you because the system should know where all of those pieces of information.

Chris Arey
Very cool. I love to hear that too, that AI is enabling people to better use the system and to make it easier and to set them up for success. That was one of the things we talked about actually on our blog, is that one of the major insights from Infor Velocity is that Info is really keen on setting up its customer base for success. so making these kinds of changes and introductions and the way that you use AI and very easily asking it a question and being able to retrieve the information on the fly. That’s just going to improve the way that people do their jobs.

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Absolutely.

Chris Arey
So another piece of technology you mentioned there is this Mongoose. And it sounds like it’s maybe similar to Config Console, but yeah, what’s the difference there? How do those two things work together and how are they different?

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Yeah, sure. So, Console, of course, is a landmark-based technology, so it’s specific to the landmark application, so your HR talent application and your financials and supply management applications. And it is a great tool for extending, modifying those applications and really kind of tweaking the applications to really meet your business needs.

Whether it’s adding an extra field because there’s additional pieces of information that an organization needs to capture alongside an employee record or in addition to what’s already there on an invoice record, those types of things. And then also, obviously, extending functionality, know, entrance rules and exit rules and additional validations and those types of things that out of the box, the system may not require a specific value.

But you as an organization have made the business rule to say, no, this field, this value on this record must always be entered. We require it for our business type of thing. So that’s really the kind of the goal of Configuration Console to really make the software work for you. With Mongoose, Mongoose is kind of a separate development platform.

But the nice thing is it’s built right into the architecture and the platform that your applications are running within. And it’s really kind of, whether it’s the financials or the HR talent applications, or whether it’s the site line or the LN or the other Infor verticals that are all part of the Infor platform, Mongoose is kind of a separate thing. And it does allow you to create some more custom objects.

So yeah, we can create custom objects in configuration console, but it is somewhat limited versus Mongoose. I want to create an object and maybe call it company car, right? I’m going to define a company car object that doesn’t natively exist in the HR application.

What it does in the back end is it actually creates a physical database table. And so the advantage there, of course, is you start talking about large volumes of custom data. Sure, you can build that within Config Console, but because it’s not creating its own object in the database, it really starts having a performance impact versus this Mongoose development platform allows you to have a little bit more structure now.

Being cloud, you still don’t have direct access to the database, but the application layer that you build within Mongoose gives you that accessibility to the data. The other nice thing with Mongoose is that, again, because it is a part of the platform, it can communicate with all of your other Infor applications.

If it’s, you know, I refer back to this company car, right, and building a library or a repository of company cars. And then, but I need to link those company cars to an employee to say, okay, well, this employee has assigned this company car type of thing. through the use of Ion and BODs, that data and that communication between the two different applications can happen. So you can sync that information between.

So it’s really a just another tool to extend the application. But to give you a little bit more development control, Mongoose is kind of touted as a low code, sorry, no code, low code, or full code development platform, where if you’re just doing some basic data modeling, you don’t really have to do much code. You kind of let the GUI do it all. Or you can interject some basic logic.

Or you can do through .NET coding, you can do full-on coding within that environment.

Chris Arey
Is the thinking there then that like because of these different ways of using Mongoose that maybe it’s more accessible to like end users depending on their skills or what is that right?

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Yeah, I mean, you can definitely say that. And then I think I said the biggest advantage here is it’s all right within your cloud ecosystem. And it’s all integrated with your existing Infor applications.

Chris Arey
Very cool. And is Mongoose available now or what’s the timeline for that?

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Yeah, no, so Mongoose is available now and it is actually available for most customers. It’s not necessarily a separately licensed thing. It is part of the cloud platform. It is not provisioned by default. And so you have to open a ticket with Infor to have it essentially provisioned and opened up. But it is something that’s part of the platform now.

Chris Arey
Very cool. And then as far as those other applications you mentioned, the GenAI and process mining, are those available now or are they coming soon?

Jeremy Stoltzfus
So process mining is a new thing that’s coming out in October, in the October release. And the process mining tool is, like I said, it’s looking at a business process. So it’s kind of taking a more process-oriented approach. it’s not necessarily process. When I talk about process, it’s not a process flow that we might refer to talk about. It’s really, OK.

When I create a requisition, then it gets approved. And then a purchase order gets created. And then that purchase order gets sent out. And then those items are received. And then an invoice is created or received and created within the system. And then ultimately, the check needs to go out the door to the vendor. So that’s the rec to check process. And that process, depending on the type of item that’s being requested or the vendor,

Chris Arey
Yeah.

Jeremy Stoltzfus
It can take on a different path. And so what this process mining utility is intended to do is look at one process, and I’ll just use the rec2check process as an example, but look at that process and see, OK, we submitted 10,000 requisitions last month. Of those 10,000 requisitions, they were all paid out within 30 days.

Or paid out to the vendor within 30 days, right? Or no, was 75 days, or, you know, and then it basically, it starts finding these trends. So that’s why it’s called process mining, right? Because it’s digging through all of the level, all of the components and all of the related data elements to figure out what path did this…

Chris Arey
Yeah.

Jeremy Stoltzfus
This request, it started with a requisition. What path did it take until it finally got paid, the check finally got sent to the vendor? And looking at the different variations, and some of them may be legit variations, Think of like a healthcare system that’s ordering items on a routine basis, right? And, you know, certain items,

Chris Arey (15:58)
Hmm.

Jeremy Stoltzfus
We know that they don’t require approval because we have a contract price for, right? But we need those items in the supply rooms for these healthcare facilities. And so they just go through and yep, we requested, it gets automatically approved. And so it’s gonna go through a much quicker process versus something that’s a high dollar value that needs a couple of levels of approval.

The process mining tool is really gonna identify those outliers and show you the different variations to the path a request takes from point A to the point where you send the check to the vendor.

Chris Arey
Got it. So it sounds like then that by instituting this process mining, companies are going to have greater visibility into their actual process to perform things and ideally improve them or introduce some cost savings by simplifying the process just because they now have this visibility into how things have been going. Is that right?

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Yeah, absolutely. Organizations are always looking to speed up the process, right, of getting supplies in the door and making sure that the vendors get paid on time. So being able to identify where the bottlenecks are in that process, life from start to finish becomes critical. So this is something that, you know, it’s really kind of a, hey, we’ve been live on CloudSuite Financials for six months, a year now.

Chris Arey
Yeah.

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Are we getting the most out of our investment that we can?

Chris Arey
Yeah, that’s awesome. the data is right there too. So like the fact that they’ve implemented this process mining tool just by analyzing the data that’s already there, it’s like, man, this is great use and it’s going to help companies maximize their investment. So love to hear that. So like thank you for sharing your big takeaways from the Velocity Summit. Sounds like it’s packed full of great info.

Unfortunately, not everybody’s able to make it to these types of events, but how are you going to go about sharing this wisdom with your clients and folks that you work with regularly?

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Yeah, absolutely. So again, from my perspective, I look at it from an implementation side. What can I be utilizing in the technology as the technology changes over the years? What can I be applying to new customers versus customers that I might have implemented five years ago? And how can I improve my process even of doing an implementation? For us, we want to try to get the customers live.

And a lot of them are asking for shortened timelines. And so what can we do to improve that process? And having an understanding of the tools and the technology available helps me to know how I can best move those customers to the cloud. And the challenge is just because there’s a technology, a new technology out there, does it mean that we should…

Chris Arey
Yeah.

Jeremy Stoltzfus
it does not mean that we should always be using the latest and greatest, right? I think about it from a system admin perspective because that’s where I lived for a very long time before joining RPI. And sure, you could throw all sorts of new technologies at me, but at end of the day, my job is to keep the lights on, keep the system up and running, keeping my users happy, right? And so if you’re 15, 20 new technologies at me, it’s harder

Chris Arey
Yeah.

Jeremy Stoltzfus
maintain the skill set to support a system like that. So that becomes the challenge of figuring out where to leverage the new technology, where does it make sense versus, no, this is tried and true. We can continue to use this technology and trying to just get the most out of a customer’s investment.

Chris Arey
Mm-hmm.

I love to hear that and while we encourage folks across the Info Community to attend these types of events, on the other hand, it’s kind of like RPI’s job to absorb this new info and create that knowledge transfer of new feature functionality and applications when it makes sense to.

Because as you mentioned, the people who are working at these organizations in a day-to-day, introducing five new tools to use is like, that’s overwhelming and probably not gonna go over well. So you gotta be strategic in what you bring up and why you’re bringing it up, right?

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Absolutely.

Chris Arey
Well, thanks for that. It’s valuable to attend these types of sessions and what comes after is just as important. So before we wrap up today though, I think you’ll remember from your earlier segment, I like to ask my guests if you could offer today’s audience one actionable takeaway, what would it be? And I’d love to hear what you have to say there.

Jeremy Stoltzfus
Yeah, sure. mean, implementing any new technology always has challenges, right? My advice, my thing is always keep an open mind, right? so, cloud-based software, it’s always evolving and we kind of, we have to evolve along with it to make sure that we’re not missing out on things that could really impact our organization in a positive way.

Chris Arey
Yeah, that’s awesome. Thanks, Jeremy. And for those joining us today, we appreciate you stopping by. If you have any questions about the Velocity Summit or how RPI can help your organization stay ahead of the latest tech, do not hesitate to reach out. You can contact us at podcast@rpic.com. Again, that’s podcast@rpic.com. This is RPI Tech Connect, and I’m your host, Chris Arey. We’ll see you next time.