State of the Infor Community: Survey Findings Unlocked

By: RPI Tech Connect   February 14, 2024

In this episode of RPI Tech Connect, we explore key insights collected from our annual State of The Infor Community Survey. Joined by industry leader and RPI Partner, Mr. Richard Leigh Stout, this episode explores customers’ experience across Infor, such as reporting challenges, cloud migration plans, and the state of the Infor Workforce Management (WFM) market.

Based off survey data collected between December 2023 and January 2024, and aimed at gauging user sentiment across the Infor/Lawson community, this sets the foundation for future trending and could even influence the product.

Join us as we unpack our top three findings and offer advice for navigating the Infor landscape. For a visual aid, download our State of The Infor Community Infographic.

Interested in listening to this episode on another streaming platform? Check out our directories.

Meet Today’s Guest, Richard Leigh Stout

Recognized as a thought leader on Infor CloudSuite and complimentary applications, 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 ten 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 an experienced B2B marketing professional with an extensive background 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 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 (00:00)
RPI consultants administered a month -long survey across the InforLost community. Our goal was to find out how users felt about the product. From functionality and ease of use to migration plans and areas for improvement, we’ve captured it all. Keep listening to find out our top three findings.

Chris (00:03)
Welcome to RPI Tech Connect. I’m your host, Chris Harry. Today, we’ll be discussing survey data collected across the Infor services community. We administered the survey between December, 2023 and January, 2024. It asked questions regarding users’ experience with Infor, as well as their plans for the system going forward. And to help us make sense of the data we collected, we have industry leader and RPI partner, Mr. Richard Lee Stout. Stout, what’s up, man?

Can you tell us about yourself?

Leigh Stout (00:35)
Hey, Chris. Thanks so much for having me on the program this week. Longtime listener, first time guest. Yeah, my name is Richard Liesel. I’m one of the partners here at RPI Consultants. I started the company back in 2004. I’ve had a few different roles consulting in both functional and technical areas. I managed our tech services practice for some time.

Chris (00:42)
Ha ha ha.

Leigh Stout (01:05)
And currently, my focus is on bridging the gap between sales and delivery. And what that means is I need to ensure that RPI is offering service that meets our clients’ needs, that’s priced competitively, and that it’s quick and easy for our clients to engage RPI to meet their import needs.

Chris (01:31)
Cool, man. Well, thanks for sharing that and for joining us on the show today. We have an exciting agenda ahead. Like I said, we’re gonna talk about survey data and my goal is to identify the top three findings from the data we collected. But yeah, so, is there anything you’d like to ask me before we jump in?

Leigh Stout (01:56)
Sure. Well, Chris, why’d RPI do a survey?

Chris (02:03)
Yeah, that’s a great question and I’m glad you asked. So there’s a couple of reasons. And the first is that we genuinely want to understand what’s going on in the community. How are folks feeling about the system, about the changes, about the move of on-premise support to 2030, things like that. And the second is I think that collecting feedback like this is invaluable. And I think if listened and acted upon, it can help influence the future of the product.

And that gets to my last point here, which is that we wanna start tracking this information on an annual basis. I think that’s gonna help with trending and more accurately understanding what’s happening in the Infor-

Leigh Stout (02:46)
That’s great. And I think a lot of our clients are gonna find this information really valuable. I mean, everybody wants to benchmark sort of where are they at and how are their feelings about their use of Infor software compare with their peers.

Chris (03:03)
Yeah, it’s an exciting time and I’m thrilled to see some of the things that we’ve collected through this process. And hopefully going forward each year we get a little more people to participate and trending that information over time. But I’m also not used to being in the hot seat so I appreciate you throwing me one. This is a first for RPI Tech Connect. But yeah, with that background, I’m glad we got to talk about that.

Leigh Stout (03:17)
Yeah, that’ll be great.

Chris (03:33)
But let’s go right ahead and jump into our first finding. And that first major takeaway is something I think we kind of almost anticipated, but now we have the data that kind of supports it. And that’s that folks need help with reporting. The majority of respondents say the biggest area Infor can’t approve upon is with reporting. And while we saw some improvements in 2023, it’s evidently not enough. So what’s going on? What do you think of that?

Leigh Stout (04:02)
Yeah, I hear that a lot. And honestly, I think this is a broader issue with a big industry shift moving from on-prem to SaaS solutions. For a long time, we all invested in technology and education on how to use that technology around reporting based on on-prem relational databases. I personally have a programming background

I think I’m still pretty fluent in SQL, even though I haven’t used it in years. And it’s, it’s a difficult shift. It’s a difficult shift for me, you know, when, when the systems that I use every day are now on a platform, I no longer have the ability to just go in and, you know, do some ad hoc queries or, you know, access the data the way that I’m familiar with. And I’m sure it’s a difficult shift for report development professionals.

for IT managers and directors, and for really anybody that needs to solve business challenges around data visibility and commit development resources in any particular area. I think the entire industry has been, has been figuring this out as we’ve gone along over the past few years, right? So we’ve had…

first a big shift to reposition these solutions as to multi-tenant cloud. And I think really clarity on reporting strategy has maybe come a little bit too late, right? There’ve been a lot of us that have made that jump to the cloud and then found that maybe the direction from the vendor or the tools that are available or just like the understanding.

of what the strategy is and how to approach this in a multi-tenant application delivery world just hasn’t been as mature as certainly as what the world that we just came from in which we have 20 years of history working with database and reporting solutions.

Chris (06:15)
Yeah, those are great insights. And it’s, what’s interesting too, is that the data, you know, folks are saying they’re having challenges with reporting. And there’s almost this kind of contradictory component to the data too, that said, you know, when folks were asked how easy it was to access and retrieve data. A lot of folks actually said that, you know, they rated that process as well or very well. So like, why do we think that there’s this?

this gap or like difference in opinion on one, where input can improve and two, like some people are saying it’s totally fine. Why do you think that is?

Leigh Stout (06:54)
Yeah, I also found that to be a really interesting insight poking into this data. It’s certainly one of the first things that stuck out to me when I saw the really excellent infographic that you put together to sort of break down all this information. And, you know, I…

When I talk to clients about how well they’re able to use Infor to get data out or do reports, I think one of the things that strikes me is that there are a number of different tool sets that are delivered by Infor for reporting, and there’s different tool sets that have strengths in different areas, they’re more positioned towards different use cases. So, you know,

As a company, obviously we’re trying to provide as much education as we can on how to use those tool sets, right? We wanna enable our client base to understand what are the tools that are available and what is the appropriate way to put them to use. And then, you know, how do we go about actually developing our reports? But we also need to look beyond the Infor Toolbox, right? The clients that we have that are finding the most success

with getting data out of their ERP system, use a multi-vendor approach to reporting. So sure, they’ve taken up the different reporting capabilities within Infor, but they’ve also taken advantage of the excellent interface and bulk data export capabilities of the platform to integrate other third-party reporting tool sets, either cloud to cloud or by

doing maybe a data replication to an on-premise or hosted database. So they’re able to really put together a number of different tools at their disposal. Some baked into the application, others, maybe tools that they’re already familiar with, perhaps already in that organization’s reporting portfolio that they have development skills and experience working with. And I think that…

That maybe helps explain the disconnect.

Chris (09:21)
Yeah, so we think then that the folks who are saying that accessing and reporting on data within Infor are, we think that the people who responded well and very well to that question are deploying a multi-solution approach. Is that right?

Leigh Stout (09:38)
That’s my theory, yes. And why don’t you let us know in the comments section if that’s true. I’d love to hear more from clients. Is that strategy working for you or no?

Chris (09:40)
Yeah.

Hahaha.

Yeah. Great. A great comment, Stout. And yes, please, for those listening in, we would love to hear from you what your experience with reporting has been. Are there any products in particular that we kind of frequently encourage folks to use, Stout? Any name drops today?

Leigh Stout (10:16)
Yeah, sure. I’ll just throw a couple out there have really gotten a lot of traction, at least among our client base. There’s a product called Spreadsheet Server made by Insight Software, which is a really focused on reporting within Microsoft Excel, particularly in the finance space. That’s something that…

really appeals to accounting and finance professionals working with working with Infor. The other one is Dashboard Gear. Dashboard Gear is a data model that helps clients with both ad hoc and more structured reporting needs and it’s a great complement to the data models that are delivered by Infor.

Chris (11:16)
Thanks for sharing that with us. Before we move on to our next insight, I have one last question for you about reporting. Is that, you know, there’s been these challenges and I think at Info Connect last year, they had mentioned something about data lake. So what does the future of native info reporting look like? Is there any hope there?

Leigh Stout (11:36)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is a big area of investment by Infor. They did hear this feedback from the client base and they positioned their development resources to attack it, right? They’re, Infor’s really prioritizing, filling these gaps in reporting with the platform. And one of the ways that they do that is they leverage some of the platform capabilities

of Amazon Web Services, right? We all know that Infor Cloud Suite runs on Amazon Web Services, and Amazon has a lot of different capabilities and features that are exposed at the application platform level that Infor can then take and make a part of their solution. And the Data Lake is one of them, right? Data Lake is an Amazon concept.

that’s been brought forward by INFOR. There’s lots that they’re doing in that area. But I would say that, you know, our business needs, they certainly can’t wait for new software or solutions to be developed and rolled out. We certainly shouldn’t pin our hopes on any one company just, you know, coming through.

Chris (12:52)
Mm.

Leigh Stout (13:03)
with some sort of silver bullet for this, right? RPI has been working in the space for a long time, right? And I can think of assessments that we did 10 plus years ago that we identified reporting as a major challenge. And we talked about some of the

Chris (13:07)
Yeah.

That’s a great point.

Leigh Stout (13:29)
some of the tools that are available at a time and would position newer technology. This is a constantly evolving space and there’s always room for improvement with reporting capabilities. So I think it’s important to just take a look at what’s available now and use the tools that are available now, not put off any possible improvement and just try and keep in mind that, whilst we try to position the areas

that we are investing in, you know, to obviously wanna align our work towards what the go-forward strategy is from the software vendor, you know, any of that could really change, you know, as time moves on anyway. So we just need to make reasonable decisions to empower our business users for their current needs.

Chris (14:22)
Nice. Yeah, thanks for that. That’s solid advice. And I think that’s a great segue into our big takeaway, a second takeaway rather, and that is about migration plans. So, you know, we asked Lawson for finance users what their plans were for moving to the cloud. And most of them actually said that they did not have plans to move within the next three years. And on the flip side,

Lawson for HR, they had a pretty much a contrasting response. And most of them answered that they would be planning to move to the cloud within the next three years. Why do we think that there is this difference in opinion, well, not an opinion, but plan for moving to the cloud between these different audiences? Any thoughts? Yeah.

Leigh Stout (15:16)
Yeah, yeah, that was really interesting. And that was at first a bit of a challenge, I think, for us to truly put our finger on. And I gotta say that Chris, your team has done a great job of really digging into this data and doing some analysis to help maybe pull back the covers on some of these insights. So we took a look at the…

Chris (15:29)
Mm.

Thank you.

Leigh Stout (15:46)
the question we asked about in for system usage, right? Like how effectively does your organization use the system? And we correlated that, you know, within finance area, we saw pretty good customer satisfaction with the system, but that didn’t translate as well over to the HR side, right? There are a number of respondents that actually

Chris (16:10)
Mmm.

Leigh Stout (16:15)
identified their Infor system as somewhat ineffectively meeting their needs. Now I think that definitely drives the momentum towards moving to a new system. I would assume that those clients that find Infor is not meeting their needs now. Certainly there’s areas to optimize or improve.

Chris (16:40)
Yeah.

Leigh Stout (16:43)
the way that application is aligned to their business processes. And going through an implementation is an excellent opportunity to sort of reset that, right? Set aside what didn’t work in the past and implement a leading practice design. I think in the HR space as well, the way that the system is used is pretty different than in finance supply channeling. A lot of HR systems

are really touching every employee of the organization. And it’s important for organizations to provide good employee experience with things like interacting with HR, with employee relations, with tasks such as benefits enrollment. And for those clients that are still on Lawson, I think that solution can feel pretty, it can feel a little

dated or awkward to the average organizational employee who isn’t using that system on a day-to-day basis, whereas a system like Cloud Suite feels a lot more like a modern application and has a lot more self-service capability. And that’s what the modern workforce expects. I think that’s a big driver for clients, particularly in the HR space, to get onto a modern cloud-based application.

Chris (18:13)
Yeah, that’s great commentary. And so if I’m hearing you correctly here too, it’s that the folks who rated their experience using Infor, mainly the HR folks who, I guess, said that their experience was less than ideal were more eager to move to the cloud. And it’s probably based on that experience. Is that right?

Leigh Stout (18:36)
Yeah, I think that’s what we’re seeing here. You know, contrast that to the finance space where we have pretty high client satisfaction. And you know, for those clients that are still using Lawson, they do have until 2030 to make that move. So, you know, if that system is working well for you, if it meets your needs,

Chris (18:47)
Yeah.

Leigh Stout (19:04)
And there’s no other compelling reason to move forward. I can see why many organizations are ranking that as a short-term priority.

Chris (19:13)
Yeah, that’s great. It makes sense too. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Ride it out until you absolutely have to.

Leigh Stout (19:19)
I think that’s what we’re seeing here. Let’s just say that I know that our clients face many competing priorities. So when you’ve got an end of life date for a legacy application that’s still six years in the future, and you’ve got some pretty good client satisfaction on that application, I can see why that’s not more near term in their roadmap.

Chris (19:47)
Yeah, that makes total sense. All right, so then getting into the final takeaway from this annual survey, it’s talking about workforce management, namely the Infor product. This question asked folks what they were using to manage workforce management responsibilities, and we saw that nearly 40%

we’re using either Kronos Workforce Central or Dimensions, and only roughly 20% were using InforWFM. Now, UKG has historically been a dominant player in the WFM space, and this data kind of shows that, but when you take a closer look and see who answered this question, when we asked this question specifically to CloudSuite HCM folks, the spread was about even. So…

So what do you think is going on in workforce management?

Leigh Stout (20:49)
Yeah, obviously UKG is the established player there for time and attendance systems. In for workforce management, it’s a little bit of a newer product, but it still has a pretty long history and it’s fully mature at this point. It meets all of the time and attendance needs of our typical clients, also has a really strong scheduling application.

I think maybe it’s just not as well known. There isn’t quite that level of marketing. And thankfully those clients that are running in for their HR system maybe do get exposed to the possibility of consolidating to Infor for their time and attendance needs as well. Obviously there’s a lot of advantages to being all on the same platform, especially when both suites of applications are best of breed.

Chris (21:52)
And I think we’ve been seeing from our own experience too, like internally and from, you know, prospects that there’s this maybe renewed interest in WFM, both, you know, as an in for application, but like as a need as well. So why do you think that is?

Leigh Stout (22:01)
Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. Well, the end of life of Workforce Central, I think pushed a lot of people to take a look at their time and attendance needs. And Infor, for their part, has been doing better jobs for getting the name out there. WFM is a top tier product. It just doesn’t have that brand recognition that some others do.

And I think that that’s going to be a big focus of Infor this year is educating the client base, hey, here’s what some of the capabilities and differentiators of WFM are. And I think that’s going to open up the possibility for a lot of organizations to make that jump to Infor WFM. You know, they’ll see what a quality product it is, and they’ll see the advantages of

that tight integration with the HR system.

Chris (23:09)
Nice. And this will be something I’ll be curious to see. We’ll ask a similar question like this next year. And it’ll be interesting to see how much the data changes between who’s using what. I suspect that we’ll see an increase in for WFM usage. So yeah.

Leigh Stout (23:28)
Yeah, well, let’s check in next year on that.

Chris (23:31)
Yeah, I’ll send you a calendar invite now. We can circle back. But yeah, man, thanks for getting into the nitty gritty there. So now that we’ve identified our top three insights from the annual survey, what do you think they suggest for the future of the Infor landscape?

Leigh Stout (23:50)
Yeah, I think what we see here is there’s some pretty good client satisfaction with Infor, and we see there’s a strong base of customers that are committed to the platform. As an organization, we’re aligned with that as well. This obviously shows that there’s opportunity for improvement, and that’s really our mission here at RPI, is to assist clients get the most value out of their Infor software investment.

Chris (24:21)
We’re getting to the end of our segment then and one of the things I like to do as I end every episode is ask the guest if they could offer today’s audience one piece of advice what would you what would you offer them?

Leigh Stout (25:31)
Yeah, if you’ve read through the Infor survey results, and you saw some things in there that piqued your interest and were wondering, hey, how does my experience with Infor compare to other users or other customers that maybe are like me? My best advice is get in touch, get in touch with other clients in your industry, in your region, and make connections and share stories. What’s working well for you?

Chris (25:32)
Who would ask? Okay.

Leigh Stout (26:01)
what areas are and find out how other users, perhaps in a similar role to yours, are experiencing the InforApplications. There are a number of different venues for this. There are regional user groups, there are community sites such as Work Out Loud. And of course, we are committed to making those connections as much as possible. RPI, we host events. We have…

training available and I think one of the big value propositions of the in-person events that we host are the opportunity to make those lasting connections. And failing that, do feel free to get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to recommend maybe another client that we know about that’s in a similar industry.

role or size that would be willing to meet you and share some stories.

Chris (27:03)
Yeah, thanks Stout. And for those listening in, we do have a series of upcoming boot camps that we’ll be hosting in Baltimore. It’s a great place to connect with like-minded folks and to share stories like Stout encouraged us to, encouraged you to do. So if you’re interested, you can sign up for one of those by visiting our website. If you’re interested in getting a copy of our State of the Community Infographic Report, you can do so by visiting our website as well.

If you have any questions about today’s episode or a boot camp or the infographic, you can also contact us at podcast at rpic.com. Again, that’s podcast at rpic.com. Thanks so much for your time, Stout.

Leigh Stout (27:47)
Thanks so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure

Chris (27:50)
Alrighty, we’ll see you next time. Take care.