Infor Coleman AI Platform to ‘Rethink Supply Chain’ and Maximize Human Work Potential
Infor has announced Coleman, an enterprise-grade, industry-specific AI platform that takes mission-critical business data from Infor CloudSuite, coupled with the supplier, logistics, and finance data from the GT Nexus Commerce Network, and analyzes it with the computing power of a hyper scale public cloud.
"Coleman," named after and to honor Katherine Coleman Johnson, the physicist and mathematician whose critical calculations helped man reach the moon, is a pervasive platform that operates below an application's surface.
Coleman mines data and uses powerful machine learning to improve processes such as inventory management, transportation routing, and predictive maintenance; Coleman also provides AI-driven recommendations and advice to enable users to make smarter business decisions more quickly.
In addition, Coleman acts as a smart AI partner, augmenting the user's work.
Coleman uses natural language processing and image recognition to chat, hear, talk, and recognize images to help people use technology more efficiently.
Coleman develops a conversational relationship with the user which can be rendered in Infor Ming.le™, a social collaboration platform, or a synthetic conversational user interface.
User efficiency is increased as studies show humans are able to speak and hear 3-4 times as many words per minute as they can type.
Processing the vast data in Infor CloudSuite, Coleman automates search and gather functions, which can take up 20 percent of a user's work week, significantly increasing productivity.
Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor, stated:
"Infor spent many years automating processes that followed clear rules, such as accounting and manufacturing processes, we are now leveraging machine learning and our access to large amounts of data to assist users with less structured processes such as complex decisions, conversations, and predictions."
Announced at Inforum 2017 this week in New York, Coleman was far and away the primary topic of discussion.
Jame Kobielus from Wikibon reported, Infor had to get serious about AI, if for no other reason than that fact that each of its chief ERP rivals - Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle - has recently doubled-down on their respective AI strategies.
Kobielus further stated, we should regard Coleman as a milestone in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market’s ongoing evolution toward thoroughly AI-first solution architectures. As discussed at this week’s event, Coleman is a comprehensive framework within which Infor is re-architecting its ERP offerings away from an intricate thicket of declarative business rules toward an architecture in which the underlying logic is adaptive, contextual, personalized, and outcome-focused.
Coleman helps optimize human work potential in four ways:
- It's conversational - interactions are more efficient and natural, and offer a better user experience
- Augmentation - serves as a partner to amplify one's work
- Automation - manages low value tasks like repetitive tasks to enable the user to focus on more valuable work
- Advise - provides intelligent insights to help the user make decisions
Duncan Angove, President of Infor, said "Coleman is so powerful because it takes the mission-critical business data from Infor CloudSuite, coupled with the supplier, logistics, and finance data from the GT Nexus Commerce Network, and analyzes it with the computing power of a hyper scale public cloud."
Elements of Coleman are available today, such as predictive inventory management for healthcare, price optimization management for hospitality, and forecasting, assortment planning, and promotion management for retail.
Over the next year Infor is expected to introduce Coleman to Infor CloudSuite industry suites.
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