Statement of direction Infor M3 Introduction Continuous functional and technical development has allowed Infor M3 to deliver industry-leading functionality for the process, chemicals, distribution, equipment, fashion, and food and beverage industries, as well as for a broad range of discrete manufacturing industries. M3 is at the core of several Infor CloudSuite industry solutions, including CloudSuite Fashion, CloudSuite Equipment Rental, CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise, and CloudSuite Food & Beverage. Industry CloudSuites are updated on an ongoing basis to the latest technology and functional capabilities for their respective industries. The solution has the scalability to support true global environments, as demonstrated by hundreds of global enterprises that currently use M3 as their primary ERP solution as well as a large of base of M3 customers worldwide, across Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific region. Infor has invested significantly in M3 and hired additional, new resources for core industry development allowing M3 and Infor to provide greater value, quicker to customers and the market. M3 takes advantage of common Infor technology components, such as Infor OS, Infor ION, Infor Ming.le, and Infor BI. M3 is Infor s flagship ERP solution for the process, chemicals, distribution, equipment, fashion, and food and beverage industries. M3 embodies our commitment to the belief of customer of Infor, customer for life. We take great pride in investing in M3, now and in the future, to ensure that we have the best solution for our customers around the world. John Gledhill, VP Product Management (M3), Infor M3 also offers further business value and a low cost of ownership to customers through certified, loosely coupled integrations with Infor s best-in-class products all contained in a user experience that is effective, provides social business connectivity, and is beautiful. Infor plans to continue to invest in M3 as a strategic ERP solution hub over the coming years by leveraging emerging Infor technologies and our best-in-class applications, in order to deliver the most complete industry suites for our target markets both in the cloud and on-premise.
Recent releases Infor values our relationship with our customers. Over the past few years, we ve continued to invest heavily in M3 to provide even more value to your business. In 2013, we introduced the M3 13.x version, with release 13.1. There were two main goals of this version. The first was to deliver new capabilities faster to our customers and to the market. The second goal was to make updates simpler, so that customers could always be on our latest technology and take advantage of the solution s new and improved capabilities. In the last 4 years, we ve delivered over 1,400 improvements, of which many were driven by our customers and focused on the industries chemicals, distribution, equipment, fashion, food and beverage, and industrial manufacturing. The latest M3 solution takes full advantage of new capabilities offered by the OS technology platform, including centering the solution around business intelligence, workflow, collaboration, and ION-based integrations to Infor s best-in-class products all delivered through a modern, consumer-grade user experience. Here are just a few new features and capabilities we ve added to the M3 solution to provide value for your maintenance or SaaS subscription: Redesigned user experience: With the introduction of the OS technology platform, M3 now moves companies from a traditional rigid and functional-oriented approach to a modern, task-oriented process harnessing the power of role-based homepages with embedded business intelligence. The new user experience will change the way your users work, delivering new levels of empowerment and productivity. New, modern warehouse mobility: Infor Factory Track for M3 replaces Infor M3 Warehouse Mobility. Factory Track is a modern, mobile barcoding solution with real-time updates and validation for employees working in warehouses. The solution s modern, HTML5 user interface delivers a device-independent user experience. Enhanced process manufacturing concepts: For Process manufacturers, we ve improved manufacturing concepts, including: version handling of products to improve product management of version changes over the lifecycle of the product, alternate processes that can contain different formulas and routing based on the calendar for products where recipes and processes change over time, and an item-pack process to more easily manage where products are produced in bulk batches and packed off into different packs of finished products (such as sizes, weights, and packaging). Grower Contract Management (GCM): The new GCM module supports the procurement of harvested materials. With GCM, you can manage full end-to-end visibility and traceability of the complete supply chain from the provision of information about the seeds (base origin) used to grow the product at the outset of the process, to the eventual financial settlement process based on the quality of the product received. Also included are advanced pricing rules for specification of cost around predefined product quality and characteristics. 2 Infor statement of direction
Infor Mobility for Field Service: This modern solution gives your field service personnel full visibility into all of the contextual information they need to get their jobs done better and faster. With a modern, easy-to-use interface and full integration with M3, your team will have the instant access to centrally stored customer and equipment data they need to solve problems more quickly. With Mobility for Field Service, your team will also be able to benefit from enhanced scheduling and routing, reduced paperwork, and single data-entry. Finished goods allocation: For some fast moving industries, such as fashion, there is often the need to change allocations on short notice. We ve introduced new, more flexible methods to define batch allocation update rules and priorities to share available inventory amongst customer orders. New integrations: We ve recently added several new integrations to M3 that broaden the solution s scope and add even greater potential value to our customers. These include standard integrations with Infor CRM, Infor EAM, Infor Rhythm, and Infor Demand+. These add to existing, certified integrations, which include Infor Optiva (PLM), Infor Supplier Exchange, Infor d/epm, Infor Supply Chain Execution (WMS), Infor Configure Price Quote, Infor Fashion PLM, and Infor Advanced Planning. Quality Management System (QMS): You can now use the new QMS module instead of the Laboratory and Inspection Control module. The QMS module supports the entire workflow, including specifying tests for a desired level of quality, executing lab requests and collecting test results, validating against one or many item specifications, and managing customer specification matching when entering customer orders. Focus on rental: Recent M3 releases have also increased the solution s ability to support complex rental processes for companies that focus on rental and who need an end-to-end solution. These capabilities are also available in a specific CloudSuite solution for equipment rental: CloudSuite Equipment Rental. Style matrix: In certain industries, like fashion, a product can have various attributes such as color, size, and fit. To increase usability and visibility of styles and their underlying SKUs, we ve introduced new matrix views for entry and maintenance of sales, purchase, and distribution orders. This supports a key industry requirement and simplifies the management and execution of style-based business transactions. Infor Sales Hub: This is a thin client solution for over-the-counter (OTC) selling, which uses an intuitive and beautiful user experience for efficient order entry. The solution is built around powerful search capabilities, including type ahead for common suggestions, customer and product search, configurable facets to narrow down search results, and inline images for easy product identification. Infor statement of direction 3
Industry-focused analytics: Recent releases of M3 have focused on delivering integrated and embedded business intelligence for all levels and roles in the organization. The industry analytics packs with predefined dashboards and KPIs give you increased visibility and value from day one. New country versions: The latest country versions added to M3 are Lithuania and Vietnam two countries with fast-growing economies. Our ambition is to support existing customers in international roll outs to these countries. For Vietnam, we translated the interface to Vietnamese and added functionality for invoicing and several legal reports. For Lithuania, we translated the interface to Lithuanian, and added electronic banking for supplier payments and customer payments, reporting of Intrastat and EU-sales reports, and audit according to SAF-T format. M3 now supports 45 countries and 22 languages. Many of the above features were the result of input directly from our customers. We continue to listen to you as we plan for upcoming releases. 4 Infor statement of direction
Next release features M3 receives updates and new components on a regular basis. Here are some examples of new or enhanced capabilities planned for the near future: Infor EDI Managed Service: We re introducing a new cloud-based EDI managed service that s designed to help manufacturers achieve faster, more accurate communications. Based on ION, the initial integration focuses on customer-facing processes, such as customer orders, order changes, acknowledgements, advance shipping notices (ASN), and invoicing. Users can easily monitor status for things like incoming EDI customer orders and invoicing. OS technology enables these messages to be integrated into the process-oriented workflows and role-based homepages. Inventory Planning Workbench: This new, powerful, and yet easy-to-use master schedule viewer and planning tool helps you focus on demand, supply, availability, and inventory levels of your selected items. The Inventory Planning Workbench enables quick, online planning, which is important in fast-moving environments, such as the food and beverage industry. Mobility for Field Service 15.6.3: We re adding usability improvements to Mobility for Field Service, such as reduced clicks and key strokes, barcode reading, and photo capture of faults. We re also adding support for phone devices, updating the way we manage maps, and rewriting the tool box to be a web app instead of a thick client. M3 integration to GT Nexus 1.0: GT Nexus is a strategic solution for collaboration across the supply chain, and is already in use by 28,000+ companies. Integration with M3 allows you to easily connect with your suppliers to share, confirm, and negotiate purchase orders. You can track the status of your suppliers negotiations, and get confirmation directly on your M3 order screen. Infor statement of direction 5
M3 Analytics 11.2.0: We re introducing further additions to the rich industry content provided by M3 Analytics. This release of M3 Analytics provides extended support to the M3 Equipment domain with new and updated models, widgets, reports, and dashboards. It also includes new in-context and drill-back capabilities, and also introduces two new languages Simplified Chinese and Dutch. M3 configurable output management: Switching to XML business documents within M3 can help reduce the cost of ownership by lessening the need for source code modifications and simplifying the tailoring of business document layouts. M3 provides greater flexibility in the generation of XML business documents, including the ability to extend with custom elements and user-defined fields without the need for any source code modifications. M3 13.4 includes these new business documents in XML format, which can be used in combination with OpenText StreamServe StoryTeller. We plan to continue to deliver more configurable XML documents in future packages for 13.4, including Purchase Orders, Purchase Receipts, Delivery Note, Pick lists, Put-away labels, and more based on customer feedback. Infor Supplier Rebate Management 10.2: A new version of Infor Supplier Rebate management is planned, featuring rebate forecasting, rebates affecting inventory value, rebate accrual at invoicing, and period accounting. Estonia and Latvia: We plan to add support for these two countries next. This will include translation to Estonian and Latvian, electronic supplier payments, customer payments, and intrastate and EU-sales. 6 Infor statement of direction
Strategic considerations Cloud As cloud computing becomes increasingly prevalent, Infor is continuing to make major investments in the cloud enablement of M3 for the benefit of our customers and to support the digital revolution. The development of a multi-tenant infrastructure for M3 includes automation, scalability, and performance improvements, together with additional extensibility tooling to support customization (avoiding the need for customers to modify M3 source code). The solution will be based on the single version concept, where customers will be able to take advantage of frequent updates. These regular updates to functionality will be delivered in such a way as not to disturb users or current processes, and will enable customers to review and activate new or changed capabilities at a time that works for them. This new multi-tenant cloud M3 is planned to be made available in both public and private cloud formats, depending on customer needs. Industry CloudSuites We intend to release industry CloudSuites that use the multi-tenant M3 as the hub within the solution, giving CloudSuite customers all the benefits seen above. Infor plans to continue to expand the range of options available as part of each industry CloudSuite over time, and these will be delivered as a service with an associated additional subscription fee. Next on-premise version We plan to take a snapshot of the multi-tenant M3 from time to time, then package the solution as an on-premise version for our perpetual-license customers. This will allow on-premise customers to take advantage of the latest technology and business application capabilities. Regulatory and statutory We plan to expand our geographic coverage and country compliance with finance, tax, and other local regulations by working directly with our customers and global user groups. This expansion will be developed and further supported by our Infor Local.ly framework and strategy, together with core M3 development. Our current plans include support for additional new countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Industry suites Our strategy is to continue to develop M3 to better support all of our customers in the manufacturing, distribution, and maintenance sectors with an ongoing focus on key industries. We ll continue to build out capabilities and industry-specific content for chemicals, distribution, equipment/rental, fashion, food and beverage, and our manufacturing customers. In addition to this ongoing development, our strategy is to also release a CloudSuite for Chemicals solution with specific predefined content, capabilities, and analytics. Continue to drive down TCO We ll continue to deliver software that is easier to use and maintain through the delivery of improved solution management tooling, more industry-focused content, and higher user productivity. All this and more will help drive down your total cost of ownership whether on-premise or in the cloud. Path for Infor legacy customers M3 is one of Infor s strategic solutions. We re developing tooling to assist Infor Adage customers in upgrading smoothly to M3 or a CloudSuite solution. We re also planning to develop tooling that ensures customers of other Infor solutions can take advantage of M3. This tooling will help reduce the time cost and risk of upgrading for our customers. Infor statement of direction 7
Future releases The following features are in the development queue, although we haven t yet established a firm availability date for them. We plan to release these new capabilities to M3 multi-tenant Cloud customers first. At a later date, these new capabilities will be delivered in a new, on-premise version of M3, as described above. Customer-defined fields: We ll introduce improved usability for M3 s customer-defined fields. We plan to enable personalization tooling within the H5 client. The user can select the related customer defined fields they wish to add to the specific panel in M3, and drag-and-drop them into the desired position. Sales Hub with OTC rental: The consumer-grade, OTC sales application (Sale Hub) will have many new-andimproved capabilities developed, such as the ability to transact simple, OTC rental transactions. Supplier consignment stock: We plan to develop M3 s support for when suppliers (vendors) provide materials and stock them in purchasers (M3 customers) premises. The materials remain in the books of the supplier (vendor) until the material is withdrawn from the stock of the consignment and put to use; at which point, the ownership/debt then moves to the M3 customer. Claimbacks (supplier rebate on sales): This major development area will include the ability to manage disputes on the line level; calculate rebates retrospectively; and allow preliminary agreements to enable rebates to be accrued, but not be claimed. Enhanced automatic reconciliation of bank statements: We plan to introduce enhanced usability and flexibility in this important reconciliation process through the introduction of additional user-defined fields, such as Cost Center. We also plan to add user-defined matching algorithms; support for one to many, many to one, and many to many scenarios to improve usability in the manual reconciliation process; and the possibility to visualize an overview per bank account. Global distribution order concept: M3 already includes support for inventory transfer processes (distribution orders DO), which allows M3 to operate across many countries through the use of the MUC concept where internal DOs are generated when inventory is moved around the world to different operations/divisions. The information in these DOs generates internal sales and purchase invoices between the operating companies that create the financial transactions. We plan to develop a new concept, global distribution orders, which will automatically create sales orders, deliveries, and invoices at the selling unit; and purchase orders, receipts, invoices, and payments at the buying unit. This will enable much more powerful internal pricing capabilities and ensure that all legal/tax requirements can be more easily met in the future as countries introduce increasingly complex regulatory standards. AM/PM rental cut-off periods: M3 rental agreements currently work on a calendar-day-basis, which typically suits most B2B customers. In the tool-hire world (B2C and small B2B), contractors and builders expect to be able to pick up tools in the afternoon in preparation for starting work at a customer s location the next morning. These contractors and builders don t expect to be charged for the tools until the next day, as they won t be using the tools until then. Similarly, contractors and builders expect not to be charged if they bring the tools back in the morning of the off-hire day; while understanding that they will be charged an extra day if the job runs over and they bring the tools back in the afternoon. We plan to add support for more flexible rental agreements with AM and PM cut-off periods to better accommodate the needs of tool-hire companies. Item Name and Description increased characters: Several customers need the Item Name and Description fields to support more than the current 30 and 60 characters, respectively. We plan to increase the Item Name field to 60 characters, and the Description field to 120 characters. We ll also include controls that allow you to determine the field lengths you wish to use within your company. Change payer customer: Some industries need to be able to change the paying customer up until the product is delivered; this is particularly an issue for industries that experience long sales-to-delivery lead times, such as make- and configure-to-order sectors. We plan to develop the ability to change the payer on a sales order at any point up to when the order is delivered. Two custom tariff codes: We plan to develop support for M3 to be able to hold two custom tariff codes, which can differ per country. One will be a tariff code for import (receiving country) and the other for export (sending country). We plan to ensure this information can be stored and printed on business documents and reports (if required). 8 Infor statement of direction
Potential future features under review We re in the analysis-gathering phase of the features identified below. Please contact your product manager if you want to contribute additional input on these or any other features that have universal appeal for this product. Enhanced extensibility tooling: We re investigating the development of tools that will allow customers to build their own business logic, and incorporate the logic in the M3 business flows to further reduce the need for customer modifications (which can be complex to maintain). Application configuration management: We re looking at allowing customers to easily move, manage, control, and copy a package of customized settings (including personalizations and extensions) across M3 core systems in a landscape through predefined transport routes. The transport process basically consists of exporting packages out of the source system and importing them into the target system(s), such as a test or live environment. Human-to-machine: We re exploring the potential of voice-activated software, which can potentially benefit M3 users in areas such as improving user productivity, increasing safety, reducing training needs, and making the system more usable in specific situations (such as for field-based roles). While this is still under investigation, primary areas where this could deliver value include chatbots in the Ming.le environment and voice-activated user instructions for mobile applications. Industry capabilities: We re continuously investigating new customer- and market-driven requirements in each of our focus industries to further enrich our industry suites. For Example: Chemicals making improvements to grading and blending Distribution enhancing supplier rebates based on actual customer sales Equipment adding new performance and CSA contract capabilities Fashion further developing central procurement processes Food and beverage strengthening trade promotions, deductions, and agreements Factory Track: We re investigating expanding Factory Track s mobile capabilities to capture transactions beyond the distribution/warehouse area, enable mobile data capture capabilities on the shop floor, and allow connections to MES-type solutions. The goal is to help our customers become more efficient in collecting important information from the manufacturing plants. Information about this document This document reflects the direction Infor may take with regard to the specific product(s) described in this document, all of which is subject to change by Infor in its sole discretion, with or without notice to you. This document is not a commitment to you in any way and you should not rely on this document or any of its content in making any decision. Infor is not committing to develop or deliver any specified enhancement, upgrade, product, or functionality, even if such is described in this document. Infor statement of direction 9
641 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10011 800-260-2640 infor.com About Infor Infor builds business software for specific industries in the cloud. With 16,500 employees and over 90,000 customers in more than 170 countries, Infor software is designed for progress. To learn more, please visit www.infor.com Copyright 2018 Infor. All rights reserved. The word and design marks set forth herein are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Infor and/or related affiliates and subsidiaries. All other trademarks listed herein are the property of their respective owners. This document is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute a commitment to you in any way. The information, products and services described herein are subject to change at any time without notice. www.infor.com. INFDTP1457152-EN-US-0118-4