Infor Announces Progress Makers Award Winners at Annual User Conference

NEW YORK, July 11, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Infor, a leading provider of beautiful business applications specialized by industry and built for the cloud, today announced the winners of the 2017 Infor Progress Makers Awards at the company's annual user conference, Inforum 2017, in New York City. These awards distinguish customers who drive innovation and showcase exceptional results in business performance after implementing Infor applications and services in various business operations including Financial Excellence, Operational Excellence, Employee Excellence, Customer Excellence, Innovation and Transformation.

A panel of Infor solution and industry experts evaluated each applicant's nomination, and the 2017 winners were chosen based on scope and depth of performance improvement, quantifiable business benefits, customer focus and satisfaction, and technology use and innovation.

"We are excited to formally recognize the innovative ways our customers are using Infor technology to drive business transformation," said Stephan Scholl, president, Infor. "These leaders received a Progress Makers Award because of their commitment to not only positively impact daily interactions with customers, employees and partners, but ultimately do business better. We see the work our customers do as an extension of the work we do to support them, so it is exciting to see such transformative growth and progress."

The winners of the 2017 Infor Progress Makers Awards are:

Operational Excellence– Reading Health System
In October 2016 Reading Health System opened a newly constructed 476,000 square foot surgical and inpatient tower, the Reading HealthPlex for Advanced Surgical & Patient Care. Designed with lean concepts in mind, the new facility includes virtually no fixed storage or cabinetry in its 24 operating rooms. The organization needed a modern solution and new processes in place to help efficiently stock and replenish supply carts that normally hold over $1 million in operating room inventory. Since the products are housed in a centrally located "Sterile Stores" location, it was paramount that the right product be available at the right time and at the right quantity to support patient care. Reading Health System turned to Infor Mobile Supply Chain Management to support this new process, in addition to assistance with managing the "Clean Returns" process of unused surgical supplies following case procedures, and to help support the "Preference Card" management process by providing recommendations for adjustments based on usage data.  After this implementation, Reading Health Systems improved visibility into 90 supply carts at more than $1 million by almost 100 percent, automating a previously manual replenishment process. In a timed study, the center also decreased case picking time from 36 minutes to 12 minutes (66%) following implementation. Most importantly, doctors now have more confidence that the right supplies, with the right par level and no expired products, can be at their fingertips at all times, which can help them provide the highest levels of patient care.

Financial Excellence– Kempinski Hotels
Founded in 1897, Kempinski Hotels is one of Europe's oldest luxury hotel groups. It currently operates 76 five-star hotels and residences in 31 countries. Kempinski deployed Infor's enterprise performance management solution in 2008. With Infor d/EPM, hotel data can be integrated with worldwide and regional hotel reporting to create beautifully designed and more comprehensive operating statements. Kempinski's reporting, budgeting and forecasting system can help provide a unique competitive advantage. Both the hotel and corporate modules are accessible through an easy to use web-based interface. The scalability of the cloud solution allows for a smoother upgrade process and can provide access to server capacity commensurate with the applicable business' needs. Kempinski broke with the traditional way of preparing the business plan, being "narratives around the budget numbers", and turned it into a strategic framework that is designed to help drive the hotel teams through the budgeting process, which results in actual budget figures.

In 2017 Kempinski launched the web-based Business Plan powered by Infor BI Dashboards, which is designed to further improve the user experience and allow real-time sharing and cooperation within the hotel and regional teams. A series of automated processes allows the hotel teams to spend more time on setting the macro-economic, hospitality market and hotel-specific assumptions; to analyze the strength and weaknesses, opportunities and risks; to conduct market research and come up with a series of strategic decisions and actions that can then tie into the budgeted result. The benefits are a more streamlined business plan review and approval process, and the ability to approve hotel business plans and corporate budgets, as planned. Realistic, assumption-based budgets and a strict forecasting process contributed to increase forecast accuracy by 88% over a period of 5 years. Involvement of the hotel department heads into the budgeting and forecasting processes can help lead to achieving the departmental goals, and to increasing the overall profitability.

Associate Excellence—Foot Locker
Foot Locker, a specialty athletic retailer that operates more than 3,300 stores in 23 countries in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, needed a solution that could help them streamline the employee recruitment/hiring process, reduce turnover and increase sales performance. Foot Locker decided to implement Infor Talent Science to help them achieve these goals, requiring all applicants at the store level to take a behavioral assessment during the hiring process, which were then compared to other profiles to recommend hires projected to have the highest success and retention rate at such store. Since initial implementation, the organization saw reductions in turnover and increases in productivity.  Because of these results, in 2016, the implementation went global across all brands, including Kids Foot Locker, Lady Foot Locker, Champs Sports, SIX:02, Footaction, Runners Point, and Sidestep retail stores. 

Patient Satisfaction- HealthLinkNY
HealthLinkNY is a "Qualified Entity" that operates the health information exchange (HIE) and population health improvement programs (PHIP) supporting healthcare delivery reform and collaboration among public and private health plans across 13 counties in New York. The HealthLinkNY HIE offers access to patient's electronic health records (EHR) across doctors and providers serving as an access point to the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY), and was in need of a new method to connect patient care records, regardless of where patients sought care throughout the state.  The organizations decided to implement the  Infor Cloverleaf Integration Suite in an effort to help improve patients' quality of care, including record accuracy, the secure exchange of existing records between providers, and the availability of  a clinical data repository for the collection and analysis of data. After this implementation, HealthLinkNY facilities reported better coordinated care, which resulted in better outcomes and more satisfied patients, all while reducing the cost of care and improving efficiencies within the healthcare system.

Specifically, HealthLinkNY found that patients experienced reduced length of stay in the ER and hospital by over 7 percent, reduced readmissions to the hospital by 4.5 percent and reduced odds of a patient needing to see multiple physicians by 12 percent. The organization also reduced the need for duplicate laboratory and imaging tests, procedures, diagnostic tests, and medication ordering and prescriptions.

Innovation – Lord, Abbett & Co. LLC
Lord Abbett is an independent, privately held asset management firm dedicated to providing the highest level of investment expertise and to delivering superior, long-term investment performance and a client experience that exceeds expectations. In keeping with its efforts to maintain an information advantage, the firm was looking for a new way to expand opportunities for all of its client-facing employees to access, analyze, and act on client data in order to enhance the overall client experience. Based on an analysis of Lord Abbett's own client data—as well as an aggregation of industry information, outside trends, and market changes—Infor Sales Intelligence for CRM, powered by Infor Dynamic Science Labs, was developed to help give Lord Abbett's sales force a competitive edge by unlocking the potential of its data to improve its client relationships. Armed with this innovative solution, the firm's sales professionals can now predict - before they even pick up the phone - what a client is likely to be looking for and how to use the call to build a deeper relationship. The new system can also help the sales force create effective follow-up emails and voice messages, which can ultimately generate more callbacks. After this implementation, cross-sales have increased by more than five times, and they have experienced a ten-fold increase in prospect likelihood conversion rates. By providing the right messaging at the right time, Lord Abbett has seen three-fold increase in its email click-through rate and increased voicemail connection rates.

Transformation– Liberty Lift Solutions, LLC
Liberty Lift Solutions (LLS), a full service, international artificial lift company, implemented Infor CloudSuite Industrial (SyteLine), in order to automate paper-driven tasks and reduce administrative burdens on the teams. Prior to automating its systems in the cloud with Infor, all sales and service work was captured on paper documents called "Field Tickets" that were often misplaced or discarded without any means of recovery, leading to lost revenue, as there was no way to invoice for goods or services. By eliminating the need to transcribe paper field tickets and making their electronic equivalents available online in near-real-time, LLS was able to reduce invoicing lead time, resulting in a 75 percent reduction in time between the completion of a field service assignment and customer invoice submission, reducing "days sales outstanding" by two days. LLS also reduced its opportunities for error by 50 percent and reduced the administrative time required to process field tickets by 50 percent.  Additionally, this project has allowed LLS to make its field ticket sales backlog visible throughout the organization 90 percent sooner than before.

About Infor
Infor builds business software for specific industries in the cloud. With 15,000 employees and over 90,000 customers in more than 170 countries, Infor software is designed for progress. To learn more about Infor, please visit www.infor.com.

For more information:
Christina Ledger
Infor
312-662-2135                                                 
[email protected]

SOURCE Infor

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