Once the dust settles and your system is live, it’s time to recapture the energy that powered your implementation and direct it toward achieving greater ERP value.
In other words, this session is designed for teams that have successfully transitioned to Infor CloudSuite and are now asking, “What’s next?”
Join RPI’s Richard Leigh Stout and Austin Keil as they dig into the critical Day 2 initiatives that help organizations make the most of their CloudSuite investment. From advancing reporting capabilities and automating AP to optimizing talent management and supply chain applications, they’ll walk through steps you can take to drive progress after go-live.
Session attendees will learn how to:
- Overcome common reporting challenges and implement effective solutions
- Leverage training to ensure success across functional and IT teams
- Revisit IPA development, manage interfaces, and harmonize technology systems
- Prioritize AP automation, procurement, and talent management for sustained ROI
- Archive legacy data efficiently before sunsetting outdated systems
- Establish a Continuous Improvement Committee to drive lasting ERP success
Whether your team is still riding the high of go-live or already feeling the weight of unmet goals, this session offers practical guidance for turning momentum into ongoing success.
Transcript
Richard Leigh Stout
Greetings. Welcome to Advancing Your CloudSuite Journey: Living on Infor CloudSuite. My name is Richard Leigh Stout. I’m a partner with RPI Consultants.
Austin Keil
And I’m Austin Keil. I’m a Solutions Coach Consultant with RPI.
Richard Leigh Stout
Austin, we’re here to talk about advancing your CloudSuite journey. Why are we qualified to speak on this subject? We’ve been working with a lot of clients that have recently moved to Infor CloudSuite — many that we’ve helped get there as their primary implementation partner. We’ve also assisted clients that needed extra help getting through a project and going live on the system. And we’ve worked with a number of clients that have recently completed a migration and are looking to better use the system, get more out of it, and create a better alignment between their business processes and objectives and how those are met by the ERP system.
Austin Keil
We’ve done a lot of engagements with clients who have gone live with CloudSuite and are looking to optimize the system, implement new modules, and take more advantage of what Infor CloudSuite has to offer. We’ve introduced a lot of clients to the wide range of opportunity in this space. And we like looking at day-two objectives.
Richard Leigh Stout
What is day two?
Austin Keil
Technically, it’s the day after go-live and after stabilization.
Richard Leigh Stout
Go-live is day one. Day two is the days, weeks, months, and short years after getting live on a new system — working through the post-live support period, working through the stabilization period. It’s the moment when your project teams are still intact, still a little tired, but also still a little excited about what more they can get out of Infor CloudSuite. It’s the time to recapture the momentum you built during a year or longer implementation project, and to follow through and ensure your organization continues to move toward the objectives you set out when you originally decided to do this project. There’s the moment you go live and cut over to the new system, and then there’s the continuous journey of getting the most out of it and achieving the goals you originally set out to reach.
Austin Keil
Some of the big day-two initiatives — beyond scope that may have fallen out due to timeline or cost — include reporting, training, interfaces and automation, payables automation, talent management, procurement and supply chain, and data archiving.
Richard Leigh Stout
Those are the topics we’ll walk through in this presentation. One way we get a pulse on what’s happening in the market is through RPI’s annual survey of Infor users. One of the questions we ask is: what specific features or functionality would you like to see improved? Reporting consistently comes back as one of the top asks across all the CloudSuite users we work with, and that cuts across industries. It’s something we hear nearly universally.
Why is reporting such a challenge? During an implementation project, you typically have a large list of reports to account for. Organizations that have been on a legacy system for many years have accumulated a significant number of reports, and a lot of the focus in a CloudSuite implementation is to ensure that the reporting needs covered by those legacy reports can be met in the new system. Sometimes we map those needs to out-of-the-box reports in the new system. Sometimes we create custom reports or find creative solutions. But the primary focus of the reporting workstream during an implementation is often just being able to say: we have reporting in the new system that’s at least as good as what we had in the old one.
Austin Keil
And Infor’s always updating the report capabilities. Reports that exist today weren’t necessarily there during the implementation. Organizations also change their goals and reporting needs over time, so it’s always good to reevaluate and see what more they can get out of the system.
Richard Leigh Stout
Exactly. Business users who have been live on CloudSuite for some time are better positioned to understand their true reporting needs, because they can look at what they’re actually doing day-to-day and identify where the gaps are. Those gaps often couldn’t have been anticipated during the project. We hear a lot of feedback particularly around financial reporting from Infor customers across industries. There’s significant room for improvement there.
Some of the ways we’re addressing that: one is expanding the use of structure relations, which can be built out iteratively — you focus on one area of need at a time, build out a structure that powers solid reporting, and take it one block at a time. Another is new reporting capability. GL Report Designer hasn’t been around as long as some other Infor-delivered reporting tools, and it’s a new option that a lot of organizations are looking at adopting in a post-go-live scenario.
Austin Keil
Other opportunities include third-party reporting systems such as Dashboardgear and Spreadsheet Server.
Richard Leigh Stout
The clients we work with that find the most success with reporting out of the ERP are using a multi-vendor or multi-technology approach. They’re not expecting the ERP vendor’s tools to deliver on one hundred percent of reporting needs. One way they do this is by using replication sets to pull data out of the ERP system, move it into a data warehouse or standard database server, and then use reporting solutions like Power BI that are more accessible for typical business analysts — without requiring them to ramp up on a proprietary ERP reporting tool.
Richard Leigh Stout
Moving on from reporting — another high area of need we’re hearing is training, and that’s something you hear from pretty much every client you’ve worked with on an assessment.
Austin Keil
Across the board, it’s training, training, training. That’s a big recommendation we always give our clients. It could be report development training — enabling clients on reporting capabilities they didn’t know about. It could be training on everyday business processes. The variety is wide, but the need is significant.
Richard Leigh Stout
It’s certainly a need we hear universally. Business users are looking to better understand how to complete processes and work through exceptions in the application. Technical support teams want to be better prepared to use the technical tools available within the Infor platform — and to stay current as Infor continuously introduces new capabilities. We also hear that organizations want to move beyond training on day-to-day processes and better understand how to deploy their ERP functionality to new business units — to be prepared as the organization grows, handles a merger or acquisition, or rolls out additional modules. Some want to be equipped to take on phase-two implementation work themselves, perhaps with advisory support from a consulting partner.
Richard Leigh Stout
In addition to training, we talked about reports being created during implementation. Another large area of work during implementation is technical development. We often have an extensive technical work plan during an implementation project, and occasionally lower-priority items fall off the list. We focus on the critical interfaces needed for day one, while other automations or more periodic interfaces get handled manually with the intention of automating them in day two. Once live, you also start to see how those interfaces respond to real-world data. What we hear from a lot of clients is that while interfaces were built according to spec, patterns start to emerge in the exceptions. Perhaps the same type of error surfaces on an interface weekly — and once you’ve identified it, you can enhance the interface to handle that data exception, mitigate the error automatically, add a notification or approval step, or do a root cause analysis and address the underlying issue in the source system.
Austin Keil
Speaking of automation — next up is payables automation. That’s about saving time and effort on data capture and bringing invoices into Infor FSM. Whether that’s RPA or RPI’s Yoga, we see a lot of clients implementing those solutions on day two to save significant time and effort.
Richard Leigh Stout
There are different schools of thought on this, and it really depends on the size of the organization, the volume of processing, and the maturity of the existing automation solutions already in place at the point of moving to CloudSuite. The situation is different when you’re replacing a mature document management system tied to a legacy financial system versus bringing in that functionality for the very first time. But pretty much all of our clients that are live on Infor FSM are looking to get better use out of workflow, document capture, and document management capabilities — exploring what Infor’s document management tools can offer and how to take fuller advantage of the document management system built into the platform, as well as adding data capture. And once organizations achieve success with data capture on payables invoices, the natural next step is to ask: what other documents can we apply these same techniques to? We’re seeing a lot of momentum with packing slip data capture to help automate receiving and support invoice matching processes.
Richard Leigh Stout
Turning our attention to talent management — this is probably the area that offers the most potential for unlocking new capabilities out of the Infor ERP system. A lot of clients moving from Lawson HR are coming from a system that was primarily a database of employee records — tracking benefits, payroll, positions, and work assignments — but with limited talent management capability. Many organizations that moved to Infor HR Talent did so specifically because they wanted to unlock talent management capabilities that are, by choice or necessity, often left as a phase-two initiative. During the project, the focus is on building core structures — redesigning the HR organization, the position and supervisor structure — and laying the groundwork for talent management modules, perhaps beginning to think about qualifications, which become the shared language across all talent management modules from talent acquisition through the entire employee lifecycle.
Austin Keil
Talent management is also a great wave two opportunity because your organization gets more comfortable on HR Talent over time and is better positioned to utilize as much of the system as possible.
Richard Leigh Stout
Some of the low-hanging fruit in talent management are compensation and position budgeting — those are probably the two modules from which you can derive the most value most quickly. Our esteemed colleague Melissa Olson would tell us there are really two kinds of talent management projects: efficiency-driven and initiative-driven. Efficiency-driven projects focus on doing a process more efficiently — faster, with fewer touch points, or with fewer systems involved. Often that means consolidating functionality within Infor, replacing point solutions that require separate subscriptions, reducing the number of interfaces, or automating something done manually. Initiative-driven projects, on the other hand, are tied to an organizational goal — like reducing turnover. Those are more than just implementing a single module or building an IPA flow. They combine functionality from several modules, custom reporting, improved notifications or approval workflows, and bring together out-of-the-box capabilities with reporting and automation techniques to work toward a single organizational objective.
Richard Leigh Stout
Turning our attention now to procurement and supply management. Some of the initiatives we’re seeing clients pursue in this area include rolling out the Supplier Order Management suite. This is new capability within Infor FSM that didn’t really have an equivalent in the legacy world. There are three components: Contract Management, Strategic Sourcing, and Supplier Portal. Each can be implemented on its own, but they work best together as a trio.
Austin Keil
We also see integration with DocuSign into the contract approval structure to store signed documents in IDM. Another low-hanging fruit is turning on Inventory Intelligence — you usually get the best results within a year since it needs to cycle through data.
Richard Leigh Stout
It’s something that should be turned on soon after go-live so you can start collecting transactional data in the new system and begin seeing what insights it can deliver. And there’s not much of an implementation involved — it really is simply a matter of enabling the capability.
Austin Keil
Another potential supply chain module is Item Lifecycle Management — formerly known as Recall Management.
Richard Leigh Stout
This really only applies to our healthcare clients, but it’s a relatively easy module to implement, provides significant value, and solves some big challenges within healthcare supply chain.
Richard Leigh Stout
The final initiative we wanted to talk about today is data archiving. When you’re implementing a cloud-based ERP system, you typically only bring a subset of your legacy data into the new system.
Austin Keil
Twenty, twenty-five, thirty years’ worth of data.
Richard Leigh Stout
Right. It’s just not feasible to transform all of that data, map it to a new cloud-based ERP, and load it in — and it doesn’t make sense to do so. A lot of organizations are left with a legacy system holding years of history while they’ve already transitioned to day-to-day processing in the new system, and they’re wondering: what’s the best way to empower business users to look up legacy data when needed?
There are a number of options, but the post-go-live period is when you’re best positioned to identify your data archiving needs. At that point you’ve actually transitioned to the new system — it’s no longer theoretical. You can look at what data you’re actually going back to access, what regulatory reporting requirements you need to meet, what retention periods apply. The simplest near-term archive is often just keeping the legacy system up and running. That works especially well in a phased migration or hybrid approach — for example, if you’re still running Lawson payroll but have already migrated to Infor HR Talent or Infor FSM. You still have all the Lawson inquiry and reporting capability that your business users already know. But that won’t last forever — legacy systems do need to be sunset. Now is the time to think through your real archival requirements and how best to meet them, perhaps by taking advantage of data archives already built for other business applications and consolidating from there.
Austin Keil
Now that we’ve talked through some of the top day-two opportunities, let’s talk about our recommended approach for tackling them. The first step is probably just to take a step back and catch your breath.
Richard Leigh Stout
When we’re in the very early stages of an Infor CloudSuite project, clients often have a roadmap laid out to immediately move into phase-two implementations at go-live, or even begin planning before go-live. And often it just doesn’t pan out that way. Getting live on a CloudSuite module — or doing a big bang approach — is a lot of work. It’s often more realistic for the project team to take a break after initial go-live. And that’s also your stabilization period: the time when you’re getting more comfortable with day-to-day processing, getting a better feel for your support needs, and ensuring your support teams are well-structured and resourced to meet those ongoing needs.
Austin Keil
And then you could potentially form a continuous improvement team.
Richard Leigh Stout
This is a strong recommendation from one of our program managers: after go-live, there should be a steering committee or group of superusers that forms a continuous improvement team. One of their responsibilities is to collect feedback from all Infor business users — allowing users to submit ideas, then taking that feedback and evaluating, prioritizing, and deciding which ideas make sense to evolve into a project or initiative. These could be things like solving a pain point, optimizing a process, making incremental improvements, or rolling out an entire phase two.
Austin Keil
And a lot of what RPI can offer is help with those phase-two modules, as well as optimizing the system — diving deep into pain points and figuring out what processes need to change or what tweaks need to be made in the system.
Richard Leigh Stout
What we think is really important is creating that phase-two roadmap — laying out a timeline of the projects, initiatives, and objectives the organization plans to tackle over the coming years and publishing that roadmap to all stakeholders. Different departments or users will have their own priorities for what they want out of the system, and you can’t do everything at once. But having a consolidated, organization-wide roadmap and getting stakeholder buy-in means that even users or departments whose projects aren’t in the immediate short term have a clear understanding of where they fall on the overall timeline and why. What other organizational needs need to be addressed first? With that transparency, you’ll get buy-in across the organization and no one will feel left out or like their needs haven’t been heard.
Austin Keil
Lee, what can RPI do to help clients with day two?
Richard Leigh Stout
Great question. We have a solid methodology and approach for analyzing where a client is on their Infor CloudSuite journey — a very structured discovery process — and then helping the organization develop a roadmap that prioritizes activities, identifying what will provide the most value with the least effort and enabling them to execute on that plan.
Thank you very much for joining us. We appreciate it and look forward to talking with you about your CloudSuite journey in the future.
Austin Keil
Thank you, everybody.
