Espen Johnsen
But as we discovered in that article, while Infor has built a truly fantastic cloud solution for M3, migrating from an on-premise implementation isn’t nearly so straightforward as most businesses might assume. First comes the common technical debt problem, including lots of modifications and customizations that won’t function post-migration. And after the migration, the sheer volume of cloud competencies to master and an array of new tools and applications like ‘Mingle’ and ‘Mongoose’ – can be overwhelming.
As a result, migrating your ERP to the cloud has the potential to be extremely disruptive if you fail to plan carefully. Over the last few years, we at Vince have been continuously refining our capabilities to help our customers navigate this cloud muddle by providing strategic partnership and subject matter expertise to ease the transition towards a future-ready cloud solution seamlessly. There are many ways we do this, but for this discussion, let’s talk about – cloud-ready development. This is a strategy we use to improve your ERP in the short term while also ensuring your business is prepared when the time comes for the inevitable migration to Infor M3 in the cloud.
Let’s look at an example of a project we worked on recently with a customer of ours – a Norwegian company who handle the replacement of car windscreens, who had a requirement to improve their customer order process in their on-premise M3 solution.
The customer receives orders via their call centers and through walk-ins at their garages across Norway. The workflow that supported their orders was extremely complicated, involving the opening of as many as 20 panels in various M3 programs to process correctly. Unsurprisingly, this process required extensive training to carry out successfully was extremely time consuming and introduced a large degree of human error scope. To solve these problems, the company brought Vince in to design a custom solution capable of simplifying the process while saving time and increasing accuracy.
In the past, this would likely have involved some modifications to the on-premise solution that would have solved the customer’s problem today but would have left them with a gaping hole in their ERP after migrating to the cloud. Instead, using tools from the Infor Extensibility toolbox, Vince developed a bespoke application that aggregates data from multiple systems behind a single, user-friendly web-based UI. The app takes data from a Nordic vehicle database, an insurance system, and M3 to automate much of the customer order process, with crosschecks taking place to ensure data quality in real-time.
The result? A task that once took 3-5 minutes can now be completed in 5-10 seconds with just a few clicks and zero training.
And crucially, because Vince developed the solution using native Infor tools like H5 SDK and Event Hub / Event Analytics instead of simply bolting on modifications that would become technical debt-in-waiting the moment they went live, this solution is 100% cloud-ready, meaning it will work just as effectively post-migration to the cloud as it does today. Not only was our customer able to improve their business processes, the quality of their data, and the usability of their M3 solution in the short term, but by working with Vince, they were able to do so in a manner that helped them plan for their eventual migration to M3 in the cloud.
The cloud conundrum is one that many M3 customers face today. And while all of them will very likely share a common cloud future, it’s fair to say the paths they take to get there will involve a few twists and turns along the way. But with careful planning and strategic thinking, there’s no reason why your company’s migration can’t be a resounding success when the time comes to take the plunge.
If you’d like to learn more about how Vince can help you successfully migrate to Infor M3 in the cloud, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
