For many organizations, the research and development (R&D) department is the primary source of innovation and business growth. It’s also often the owner (or at least a critical partner) of regulatory compliance. But R&D can’t succeed if it’s operating in a silo. With Infor PLM for Process, all information regarding products and projects is stored in one place, where multiple functional groups can access the data. This can help create a higher level of enterprise-wide visibility with sales, marketing, operations, and quality teams. With one system, teams can contribute and interact—which can result in lower change- management costs and higher productivity levels.
Ultimately, Infor PLM for Process is designed to help product development take less time while minimizing costs and reducing risks. It helps provide real-time visibility into performance, status, requirements, and costs. Manufacturers can also automate the process of reviewing and analyzing the product portfolio and managing staged projects.
Additionally, the solution can eliminate repetitive work in a range of processes—from change management for quality and labeling issues, to plant localization, to full project management for new product development and introduction processes. With Infor PLM for Process, manufacturers gain a more structured and responsive approach to project management, including the ability to:
- Manage tasks and assignments, as well as provide real-time feedback on projects to make R&D teams more effective.
- Help to improve raw materials and supplier enablement processes (such as procuring raw materials, packaging, or complete products) to reduce costs, improve quality, and help support compliance efforts.
- Simplify rationalization processes to optimize the introduction of new materials, helping to reduce material spend and ensure benefits are sustained.
- Eliminate the need for data reentry through a unique stage-gate process capability with full integration to all applications, validations, and workflows.
- Comply with changing customer and
regulatory requirements
For manufacturers in the food, beverage, chemicals, or life sciences industries, navigating changing and often overlapping regulatory requirements presents significant R&D challenges. This is particularly true when venturing into new and evolving segments, such as cannabis or fresh prepared meals. Infor PLM for Process can help get products to market faster, while also assisting with evolving regulatory requirements.
Regulations continue to evolve to achieve stricter environmental and safety standards and vary from country to country. Whether meeting reporting requirements for chemical companies, complying with new labeling laws for restaurants, or supplying more detailed information on the country of origin for ingredients across segments of consumer packaged goods (CPGs), confidently managing all the required data can seem overwhelming.
Further adding to the complexity is when the products potentially fall into multiple categories. For example, as food companies introduce nutraceutical products, or adopt new ingredients such as cannabis, the products start to resemble life sciences products rather than just food.
Meanwhile, chemical companies are increasingly moving into more niche areas that can range from food ingredients to personal care products. Infor PLM for Process proactively supports customer compliance efforts regarding regulatory requirements. The solution’s integrated global specification management and product information management processes can help:
- Automate the creation of documentation that meets marketing and regulatory requirements by using industry-specific label capabilities, including ingredient statements, Safety Data Sheets (SDS), and more.
- Achieve compliance with regulatory agencies worldwide, such as labeling and nutritional declarations for food, chemicals, and other consumer packaged goods (CPG) products.
- Gain insights on packaging to help organizations improve and report on their carbon footprint and food contact information. PLM for Process provides packaging composition, automatically generating a list of packaging subcomponents. Using data from their suppliers, they can view and report CO2 and material type with quantified weights from unit to pallet level.
- Manage and maintain key documents via Infor Document Management’s central file repository. Gain greater flexibility in managing product- and project-related documents (including label artwork and supplier documentation) by being able to provide documents in context, serve up documents as a homepage widget, and offer sophisticated search capabilities.
Collaborate more effectively
Collaboration in today’s workplace is key. Infor PLM for Process can help teams work in communities of shared interests, collaborate effectively, improve processes, act faster, be productive, and generate excellent results. Infor PLM for Process transforms how work gets done by helping users to:
- Maintain accurate and complete data internally and externally across all trading partners.
- Meet production performance objectives, minimize risks, and improve scalability.
- Leverage real-time visibility and enhance decision-making by continually validating sample requests and feedback.
Improve existing products
While creating new products is important, continuously improving and optimizing existing products to make them cost-effective is equally essential. This is especially true when the availability, cost, and characteristics of raw materials can vary over time. Infor PLM for Process has the tools to optimize product portfolios in several ways, allowing organizations to:
- Meet target specifications with lower costs, while supporting them in meeting their compliance requirements via formulas, recipes, packaging, finished goods, application, and at-home recipe simulation and modeling capabilities.
- Simulate and model across all product lines and business units to improve sourcing economies of scale, and knowledge transfer while helping to meet corporate compliance and regulatory restrictions.
- Use material analysis modeling that integrates R&D and operational data to model formulas based on actual product results.
Streamline operations
Infor PLM for Process can help organizations speed product development, improve product effectiveness, adapt to market demands without custom coding, and support their efforts to meet complex regulatory compliance constraints. By equipping manufacturers with the tools to integrate and streamline their operations, they can collaborate more closely with suppliers, and manage the entire new product introduction and product development process. Infor PLM for Process provides:
Deep integration—Infor PLM for Process’s deep ERP system integration helps establish continuity across applications. This delivers consistent information via a consumer-grade user experience that unifies the business software. Users will always have all the information they need, where and when they need it. In-context business intelligence also allows users to automatically see that information.
Role-based dashboards and powerful personalization tools—Empower users to arrange graphs, key metrics, priority alerts, and favorite inquiries on a single screen—creating one place to go for all information and helping users make more informed decisions. Alerts and pre-defined workflows automatically deliver critical information to the right person. Infor PLM for Process delivers a single source of information that includes data from sources both inside and outside the enterprise, presented in-context to the user.
Social collaboration—Use social networking technologies inside the organization to improve the speed, scale, and value of interactions between employees—dramatically changing the ways in which they work with information, systems, and each other. Easily tap into the knowledge and expertise of others across departments, geographies, and time zones, to make decisions quickly and with confidence. Uncover extraordinary sources of value and productivity that currently go untapped, drawing on the insight of experts across the enterprise to create a searchable knowledge base of critical content.
Solve complex challenges
Based on the latest advances from both the consumer and enterprise worlds to deliver new levels of usability, connectivity, and insight, Infor PLM for Process changes everything business users thought they knew about business software. It helps shorten time to market, trim costs, and improve quality and certification processes.
With 30+ years of PLM expertise and commitment to solving business challenges, Infor is recognized as one of the market leaders of PLM solutions for process manufacturers. With Infor PLM for Process, manufacturers gain a complete, end-to-end solution on a single platform that provides deep ERP system integration.
Functionality specific to process manufacturing enables formulation modeling and least-cost formulation. With a consumer-grade user interface, users can experience a flexible, easy-to-use environment designed to increase productivity, as well as expanded, out-of-the-box industry functionality. In addition, alerts and predefined workflows automatically deliver critical, role-based information. Meanwhile, flexible deployment methods allow Infor PLM for Process to be implemented on-premises or in the cloud.
With a single source of the truth and real-time visibility, Infor PLM for Process helps support manufacturers in:
- Increasing efficiency and lower unit costs.
- Improving collaboration throughout the organization.
- Meeting customer and regulatory compliance requirements.
- Navigating quickly across applications, thanks to a cxommon user interface.
- Eliminating or combining parallel work.
- Automating workflows.