Infor Delivers Better ERP Hooks Into Salesforce.com

September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

Infor customers can now feed data from multiple, disparate ERP systems or even multiple divisions of the company into their Salesforce.com implementation using its latest Inforce connector, the company announced in August.

Inforce is a collection of software as a service (SaaS) offerings that automatically populate data from Infor’s back-end ERP and financial systems into the front-end Salesforce.com CRM offering. The first Inforce offering for sales professional debuted in early 2012, and was followed up with two more, for marketing and customer service disciplines.

Inforce’s new multi-ERP and multi-company capabilities will enable larger organizations to take advantage of the solution. This will enable those organizations to have “clearer visibility into customer relationships, supporting a more customer-centric business process,” says Infor senior product manager Michael Bristol.

The widening of Inforce capabilities extends to Business Object Documents (BODs), the XML-based documents that Infor uses to expose and share data from its various enterprise applications through the ION middleware.

Previously, Inforce could work with about a dozen BODs. With this release, it now supports all BODs that Infor developers have mapped to the dozens of ERP, EAM, HCM, PLM, SCM, and related enterprise apps that it owns. According to Infor, the new “Inforce Any BOD” functionality can use any of the more than 100 BODs that Infor has created.

Infor also rolled out a new quote object as part of its mid-year Inforce update. This new object is designed to allow users to view quote information generated from the Infor ERP system from the Salesforce.com screens. The quotes can be created and associated with a contact, account, or opportunity, or exist on a stand-alone basis, Infor says.