Infor
[The Planning Survey 21 results, not included in The Planning Survey 22] Infor is a global US-based vendor of industry-focused business software solutions. The company was founded in 2002, has 140 locations worldwide and supports over 67,000 customers in around 180 countries. Infor is privately held by Koch Industries.
Infor’s CPM, BI and analytics portfolio comprises two main solutions: Infor Dynamic Enterprise Performance Management (d/EPM) and Infor Birst. Infor d/EPM is the vendor’s original analytics and CPM product and was initially developed by MIS long before 2002. Infor d/EPM includes components for dashboards, reporting, OLAP analysis, planning and financial consolidation. Since the acquisition of Birst in 2017, Infor has changed its go-to-market and product positioning strategy significantly, splitting its portfolio into CPM and analytics products, which are integrated with each other. Infor d/EPM is now positioned to serve CPM usage scenarios (including planning and financial consolidation) and Birst to serve analytics use cases. Infor d/EPM and Birst are marketed to mid-sized companies and large corporations in all industry sectors. Both products can generally be used with Infor’s existing ERP, CRM and SCM applications via predefined connectors but also standalone with third-party data sources (e.g., SAP, Salesforce, etc.). However, when selling the products, Infor has a strong focus on its own customer base and upselling analytics in addition to operational applications.
Infor d/EPM is a flexible CPM product combined with prebuilt business content. The platform provides a multifaceted development environment for tech-savvy business power users to build custom CPM and analytics applications. Predefined CPM applications are available for various business functions and industries, including strategy management, budgeting, planning, financial consolidation, workforce planning and budgeting and others. Recently, the vendor introduced a new version of Infor d/EPM with a completely rebuilt state-of-the-art services architecture across all components and modernization improvements as well as several newly developed components such as Excel integration, business modeling, relational modeling and d/EPM administration.
Birst is Infor’s cloud-based flagship BI and analytics platform and plays a significant role in its unified cloud strategy. Birst connects to Infor’s business applications such as ERP and CRM, and to Infor d/EPM’s underlying OLAP database, as well as to non-Infor systems. For selected Infor applications (e.g., CloudSuite Analytics, Lawson Analytics), Infor provides an analytic-ready data warehouse with semantic layer, predefined KPIs, reports and dashboards. In addition to providing formatted and ad hoc reporting, dashboarding, self-service data discovery and advanced analysis, Birst offers a full-stack solution that includes ETL and data preparation, data warehousing, mobile access and machine learning integration.
User & Use Cases
Besides planning, customers mainly use Infor d/EPM for standard/enterprise reporting (80 percent), ad hoc query and reporting (77 percent) and basic data analysis (73 percent). 48 percent of respondents plan to use it for advanced analysis in the future. Infor d/EPM targets mid-sized and large companies across all industries. 47 percent of our sample of Infor d/EPM customers come from mid-sized companies (100-2,500 employees) with a median of 90 users (including 33 using planning functionality), but the mean of 157 users (82 for planning) indicates there are also several larger implementations. 50 percent of Infor d/EPM users are planning users – significantly below the survey average of 66 percent – reflecting the fact that Infor d/EPM is essentially an integrated tool with planning but also analytics functionality.
Current vs. planned use (besides planning)
N=30
Percentage of employees using Infor
N=30
Planning users (as a percentage of all users)
N=30
Total number of users per company
N=30
Planning users per company
N=30
Company size (number of employees)
N=30
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