Infor Ships New Release of Visual ERP

Published: August 22, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Infor, the OS/400 ERP software industry's software consolidator-general, last week unveiled a new release of its Visual ERP line, which it acquired from Lilly Software Associates almost two years ago. With Infor ERP Visual 6.5.2, the vendor has added new features designed to reduce implementation time and speed access to manufacturing data.

Infor ERP Visual is a suite of enterprise applications for manufacturers and distributors that includes advanced planning and scheduling, quality management, customer relationship management, time and attendance, business intelligence, and warehouse management functionality. The software, which runs on OS/400 and Windows, was used by about 3,000 customers before Atlanta, Georgia-based Infor bought privately held Lilly, also headquartered in the OS/400 hotspot of Atlanta, in October 2004.

The focus of Infor ERP Visual 6.5.2 was to enable users to get important information out of their ERP systems more quickly and easily, according to Infor. "The challenge was to present more information to enable end users to increase their overall productivity," says Jack Shannon, president of Visual South, an Infor channel partner based in Concord, North Carolina. "We worked closely with the Infor development team to incorporate customer requests and the response has been overwhelmingly positive."

Specifically, Infor ERP Visual 6.5.2 introduces several new productivity features, including customizable "view panels" that allow users to more easily drill down into data. This release also bolsters the product's query capabilities with new filters and the capability to save profile searches, so users can execute the same query at any time.

It is also easier with this release for users to edit multiple records, which was "historically one of the most time intensive tasks," Infor says. Instead of editing records one by one, users can simultaneously browse and edit multiple records. Alternatively, they can export the information into Microsoft Excel, and then re-import the records into the ERP system after editing them in Excel. When Excel is used, the system validates each record to make sure there are no errors, Infor says.

Visual ERP also gains new e-mail tricks. In previous releases, it was a cumbersome task to type in e-mail addresses and then attach documents to those e-mails. With this release, the user identifies the appropriate documents and the appropriate contacts, and are able to send the documents with a single click, Infor says.

Lastly, this release gains a new component called the Manufacturing Window that is designed to show employees what actions have yet to be accomplished regarding the completion of a work order.

All together, these features should help companies more effectively deal with the complex requirements of the manufacturing industry, says Jeff Ralyea, vice president of product management of Infor. "Visual enables manufacturers to recognize failures within quality control, trace the underlying issues back to the originating action or transaction, then make appropriate adjustments before problems occur," he says.