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Infor's Rick Rider: Embedding AI Delivers a Value-Plus Innovation Stream
By Mitchell Beer
May 21, 2024 4:45 pm EDT
Rick Rider
Senior Vice President of Product Management,
Infor
Infor’s commitment to continuous rapid innovation is translating into non-stop opportunities for customers as the company doubles down on developing a value-plus innovation stream, Rick Rider, Senior Vice President of Product Management, will tell participants at TUG CONNECTS 2024: ignite!
“It comes in the form of new user experiences, designed in a way that you can take them in bite-sized increments and implement them extremely fast,” Rider says. “One thing the TUG community has done really well is to embrace those types of innovations, probably faster than any of our other communities.”
And now, “there’s a continuous stream, we’re churning out more of those innovations, and we expect them to snowball over the years.”
The renewed focus on solving specific, practical business problems reflects Infor’s evolving understanding of what it means to be an ERP provider.
“We don’t want to just be a system of record,” Rider says. “We want to transform the way companies handle their data to improve their metrics and grow their business.” That means building new functionality “on the periphery of what the ERP is designed to do” to continue delivering superior value, particularly for customers that are positioned to take it up quickly.
That approach can apply to a host of small but essential applications, from using generative AI to summarize emails to developing a steady flow of vendor and supplier recommendations. Those business supports are valuable to employees at all stages in their career, but they’re particularly important to boost job satisfaction and employee retention among younger hires.
“We’ve got this evolving work force with younger employees who won’t want to access the system and work in the same way,” he notes. “So how do you get them interested in the business as a whole? Inevitably, you’ve got to start giving them some decision rights, so how do you do that safely?”
Using a form of in-house gamification, “we can simulate business decisions that a user can make. Then the AI behind the scenes predicts how well that decision will perform and puts that information into the hands of downstream users,” enabling them to weigh in as needed on more critical business decisions.
“So you’re using technology to get the most out of your work force by reskilling them, and also giving a new demographic an interactive access point for business operations.”
Rider credits TUG members’ first mover advantage among Infor user communities to members of the Board who’ve been running hybrid systems in their own businesses, keeping their applications on-premises while elevating their data to the cloud to take advantage of machine learning and advanced automations across all their products.
The innovation in the TUG community also reflects the large number of member companies that “want to start down these project paths without it being a heavy lift. Once they complete one project, it creates another and another and another,” with some of the biggest stars “literally coming to us every other week asking what we’re going to do next.”
That cultural difference has helped TUG members realize that “you can still take advantage of cloud-based Infor software” while still relying on legacy systems on-premises.
Rider says TUG is playing a major role in a new developer community that Infor is in the midst of building out. The ultimate vision is to give users a platform to build their own solutions. “That sort of enablement and facilitation between customers is a great way to accomplish things, which is really what Infor is in the game for.”
