Infor Delivers Coleman AI Digital Assistant

At the Inforum
Conference, the Company Also Introduced Infor Coleman AI Machine Learning
Platform

SINGAPORE / NEW YORK, US – Media
OutReach – October 19,
2018 – Infor, a leading provider of industry-specific cloud
applications, �has announced the general
availability (GA) of its Infor Coleman Digital Assistant, which is designed to help maximize human work potential by
enabling natural language extensibility and accessibility of Infor CloudSuite.
From a user perspective, the Infor Coleman Digital Assistant can help make work
more enjoyable and productive. 

 

At its annual Inforum customer conference, the company
also introduced its Infor Coleman AI Platform for
embedded machine learning models, which it expects to deliver in the Spring of
2019.

 

Infor
Coleman AI Digital Assistant

The Infor Coleman Digital Assistant is the first in a
series of new products rolled out under the Coleman AI umbrella and provides a
conversational interface to the Infor OS platform, the underlying foundation of Infor
CloudSuite. It offers custom skill building, a voice user experience (UX) and
navigation, and natural language processing (NLP) extensibility.

 

As a digital assistant, Coleman uses a conversational
UX and natural language processing — with deep domain and industry knowledge —
to chat, hear, talk, and in the future, it is expected to analyze images to
help people work more efficiently. The Infor Coleman Digital Assistant can help
maximize human work potential by:

• Advising. It can provide
  intelligent insights designed to help users make decisions.
• Augmenting. It can serve as a
  partner to help amplify one’s work and provide key information at critical
  decision points.
• Automating. It can complete
  low-value, repetitive tasks to enable users to focus on more valuable
  work.
• Conversing. It can offer a better
  user experience with more efficient interactions.

 

Michael Bollinger, President of Grimco Canada, a leading wholesale sign supply manufacturer and
distributor with more than 50 locations across North America, said, “In our
business, it is all about speed and agility. Being able to have data and AI
allows us to get ahead of where everybody else is.”

 

As one of the beta customers of the Infor Coleman
Digital Assistant, Bollinger said Grimco is using Coleman to “take a look at
inventory and find products more quickly, so we can make better decisions for
our customers. We can quickly determine if we have a product in stock in
Toronto, or if we have product ‘z’ in stock in Montreal, for example. We can
pull out this information quickly and speed our response times to
customers.” 

 

Rick Rider, Infor Coleman Product Director, said,
“According to research from McKinsey & Company, the average interaction
worker spends nearly 20 percent of their time looking for information or
tracking down colleagues for help with specific tasks.¹ With the ability to
quickly source data, automate repetitive processes, and help optimize
workflows, Coleman can improve the work experience and help make workers more
productive. This can result in significant savings for organizations.”

 

The Infor Coleman Digital Assistant also is expected
to be integrated with Amazon Alexa for Business — which provides tools to
manage Alexa devices, enroll users, and configure skills with added security
across those devices — by the end of 2018.

 

The Infor Coleman Digital Assistant will be available,
upon GA, to Infor OS customers, and example skills will be available, at
Inforum, from product suites such as Infor CloudSuite Distribution (CSD), Infor
CloudSuite Industrial, Infor CRM, Infor LN, Infor M3, Infor CloudSuite
Financials & Supply Management (CSF/FSM), and Infor Global Human Resources
(GHR), among others.

 

Infor
Coleman AI Platform
The Infor Coleman AI
Platform is a pervasive machine learning platform that operates below an
application’s surface. It mines data and uses powerful machine learning to help
improve processes such as inventory management, transportation routing, and
predictive maintenance.

 

The Infor Coleman AI Platform represents a giant leap
forward for AI at scale — incorporating deep reservoirs of network data to help
serve the needs of human workers and to help make connected devices smarter.

 

The platform is specifically designed for
non-technical, business users and is built upon a foundation of
industry-specific data. The Infor Coleman AI modeling environment is
“digestible,” in that it doesn’t require as complex of a skillset as other AI
tooling, nor is it designed to require an exhaustive service engagement.
Customers can better understand, relate, and trust the output, given the focus
on user-experience and embedded connectivity to the entire applicable enterprise
suite.

 

“The Infor Coleman AI Platform can help customers
better analyze their data and give them the ability to start asking questions
they didn’t even know they should be asking,” Rider said. “It can automate
tasks that were error-prone, which can help organizations save money by
avoiding certain issues or taking advantage of specific opportunities more
quickly.”

 

Organizations can work to gain a competitive advantage
by creating models from their proprietary data and experiences, and the Coleman
platform enables them to pass along advantages, up and down stream, using their
AI insights.

 

This can be particularly appealing to enterprises such
as Headwater Companies, LLC, a collection of groundwater distributors. This
collective and vested group works to ensure a focused groundwater distribution
organization that delivers quality products and leading brands to the industry,
providing contractors with the availability and service to meet various
application challenges.

 

According to Matt Hendrickson, IT Director at
Headwater Companies, the Infor Coleman AI Platform’s citizen developer toolset
and embedded nature make it unique and attractive.

 

“For us to take full advantage of an AI solution, it
needs to be easy to deploy and use,” he said. “Coleman’s embedded system with
rapid deployment programs should help facilitate this. If we can leverage the
solution, without spending months or years on development, the rest will take
care of itself.”

 

Hendrickson said that Headwater expects to use the
Coleman platform to help ensure it has products available when customers need
them.

 

“We are looking to the Infor Coleman AI Platform to
give us predictive insights into when products will go out-of-stock,”
Hendrickson said. “We want the platform to take action in advance of the
stock-out. Maybe this is a notification to a buyer to change their buying
habits because of certain weather events, such as droughts or hurricanes, for
example. Or, it could be a notification or integration with the supplier’s
system, which they can use to adjust their manufacturing forecast.

 

It all ties back to one of our core strategies,”
Hendrickson added. “We want to provide the product availability and service our
customers demand.”

 

Infor
Coleman Roadmap
Among the capabilities that
Infor expects to deliver with its Infor Coleman technology stack are barcode
and QR code scanning and custom image training, or image recognition
technologies, known as Infor Coleman Vision. Once a user presents Coleman with
a scanned barcode or product image, for example, Coleman could return the
desired product information and ordering instructions, or any other applicable
skill setup through the same Infor Coleman Digital Assistant skill builder.

 

Coleman is named after the inspiring physicist and
mathematician Katherine Coleman Johnson, whose trail-blazing work at NASA
helped man land on the moon.

 

Additional
Infor Coleman Resources

For more information about Infor Coleman AI
capabilities, click here.

 

Tweet This:
.@Infor delivers Coleman #AI
Digital Assistant, introduces Coleman #MachineLearning Platform to help make
work more enjoyable and productive. https://bit.ly/2NxeTLG

 

About Infor
Infor builds business software for specific industries in the cloud. With 17,000
employees and over 68,000 customers in more than 170 countries, Infor software
is designed for progress.  To learn more, please visit www.infor.com.

 

¹McKinsey
& Company, McKinsey Global Institute Report, “The social economy: Unlocking
value and productivity through social technologies,” July 2012.

This
announcement reflects the direction Infor may take with regard to the specific
product(s) described herein, all of which is subject to change by Infor in its
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