Infor: Energizing EAM

Sprawling across acres of an organization’s premise, IT departments house multiple critical assets interspersing throughout its schema.

A walk into the establishment reveals the towering testament to a gamut of IT assets—elucidating the challenge of managing this myriad of assets under one unified and powerful control structure. Enterprise IT assets are not only numerous, but also hectic to maintain, acquire, and configure—making seemingly basic activities such as keeping precise track of assets, scheduling the use of equipment, or documenting imperative incident details snowball into the biggest headaches for an organization, if they aren’t handled effectively. The miss-management of these events leaves organizations with perturbing questions—“Do we know who is accountable for each asset? When was the last time we did a physical inventory of these assets?”.

Questions like these can make the maintenance and facility management professionals of an organization distressed. Making it further challenging for a company is the fact that these assets rapidly depreciate—requiring firms to constantly update them. To make EAM overwhelmingly painless for organizations, Infor provides unparalleled capability for cost-effective, asset-intensive, and performance-oriented maintenance operations. Infor EAM delivers a set of capabilities that makes it easier for organizations to efficiently deal with service requests, moves, suppliers, and physical custody of enterprise assets. The powerful features help firms apply the rich functionality, broader extensibility, and enhanced mobility of Infor EAM to a wider set of requirements in their workplace, much as in the case of CERN. Physicists at CERN are seeking answers to the universe’s biggest mysteries, using some of the world’s most powerful particle accelerators. With such high stakes, proactively monitoring these accelerators becomes one of the most critical responsibilities in ensuring no failures or disruptions occur—the reason behind the laboratory choosing Infor. The latest innovations in Infor EAM made it possible for CERN to innovate very precise capabilities, helping them achieve higher levels of support for specific business processes.

“Unique resources such as those at CERN require the highest levels of operational efficiency, including features for mobile resource management, access to personnel safety, compliance requirements, and complex data security at all times,” states Charles Phillips, CEO, Infor.

The EAM Power-Play

Infor EAM provides organizations with the power to improve capital asset management in ways that increase reliability, enhance predictive maintenance, ensure regulatory compliance, reduce energy usage, and support sustainability initiatives.

Powered by Infor Xi, a next generation technology platform, Infor EAM suite provides EAM Enterprise, EAM Energy Performance Management, and Infor MP2 solutions.

With Infor EAM Enterprise, a comprehensive enterprise asset management solution, organizations can monitor its asset condition and performance, evaluate data to find key trends and anomalies, forecast performance concerns, and make decisions that drive action. EAM Enterprise addresses an organization’s most challenging asset issues, from preventative maintenance for discrete manufacturing to linear asset management for oil and gas, and asset tracking and condition-based maintenance for public sector organizations. Furthermore, Infor EAM Energy Performance Management solution allows organizations to deliver the financial and physical controls an enterprise needs to be in full control of their sustainability, energy consumption, and the asset and operating infrastructure that underpins them. What completes the EAM power-play is Infor MP2 which efficiently manages maintenance processes, collaborative workflow, reporting and analysis, inventory, financial and budget information, logistics, and e-commerce of an organization.

Available in industry-specific editions, the Infor EAM suite provides an organization with unparalleled flexibility to zero-in on the specialized, industry requirements that can turn the company’s asset management into a competitive advantage. Preconfigured to focus on the distinct needs of a range of industries, the Infor EAM Suite is tailor-made for manufacturing, healthcare, hospitality, public sector, and oil and gas companies.

Endowing a Mobile Edge

To improve the efficacy of their EAM suite even further, Infor provides a mobile edge to its customers through Infor EAM Mobile. With mobile access to EAM, Infor proffers an organization’s maintenance and asset management team with the asset information at the point of performance.

EAM customers obtain easy mobile access on virtually any popular mobile platform to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of asset management personnel who work in the field with Infor EAM Mobile.

A competent platform, Infor EAM Mobile requires no middleware layer that adds cost and complexity as it runs on popular consumer devices. Infor EAM Mobile provides an organization with rich, real-time connections to the powerful capabilities of Infor EAM, including work order management, asset tracking, and inspections. It delivers a state-of-the-art, cost-effective, mobile computing infrastructure on an easy to use consumer device which empowers mobile workers with better decision making and productivity in the field, and a quick return on investment.

Infor EAM v11 and the Future

At the firm’s annual event for 2016 held in NYC, a diverse array of technology presentations, focused networking opportunities, education sessions, and many product launches were on display, with the Infor EAM v11.2 being the show-stopper!

"To improve the efficacy of their EAM suite even further, Infor provides a mobile edge to its customers through Infor EAM Mobile"

The powerful capabilities of Infor EAM v11.2 allow an organization to gain a more convenient, comprehensive, and logical tool for tracking assets and managing all the administrative details associated with asset management, as well as monitoring key information that can make a difference in the future.

The list of enhancements in the v11.2 release is extensive and includes case management, key management, contractor portal, workspace management, move management, asset reservations, consolidated call center, configurability, and automation. Infor EAM developed the new modules, capabilities, and features by leveraging the Infor user communities. The firm has an active, international community of users that provides inputs to the product development team. Infor supports the EAM product with more than 160 dedicated resources across the company, a strong resource commitment that shows Infor’s dedication to the EAM product.

Infor currently offers a number of ways to communicate and co-relate with assets and is working to define its Internet of Things (IoT) strategy. Infor’s strategy consists of creating industry specific cloud ‘suites’ that run on Amazon AWS and are designed so that customers don’t have to build in their own customizations. This differs from other generic EAM solution providers, and the firm is now beginning to verticalize their offering.

As a future prospect, Infor plans to focus on the “editions” of its products for various industries such as facilities, healthcare, and transportation. Staying dedicated to the EAM space, Infor strives to build industry-tailored editions to provide a better and rapid ROI for EAM Enterprise suite customers—bringing world-class asset management to users’ fingertips.