At the InforumConference, the Company Also Introduced Infor Coleman AI Machine LearningPlatform

SINGAPORE / NEW YORK, US - MediaOutReach - October 19,2018 - Infor, a leading provider of industry-specific cloudapplications,  has announced the generalavailability (GA) of its Infor Coleman Digital Assistant, which is designed to help maximize human work potential byenabling natural language extensibility and accessibility of Infor CloudSuite.From a user perspective, the Infor Coleman Digital Assistant can help make workmore enjoyable and productive. 

At its annual Inforum customer conference, the companyalso introduced its Infor Coleman AI Platform forembedded machine learning models, which it expects to deliver in the Spring of2019.

InforColeman AI Digital Assistant

The Infor Coleman Digital Assistant is the first in aseries of new products rolled out under the Coleman AI umbrella and provides aconversational interface to the Infor OS platform, the underlying foundation of InforCloudSuite. It offers custom skill building, a voice user experience (UX) andnavigation, and natural language processing (NLP) extensibility.

As a digital assistant, Coleman uses a conversationalUX and natural language processing -- with deep domain and industry knowledge --to chat, hear, talk, and in the future, it is expected to analyze images tohelp people work more efficiently. The Infor Coleman Digital Assistant can helpmaximize human work potential by:

• Advising. It can provide intelligent insights designed to help users make decisions.
• Augmenting. It can serve as a partner to help amplify one's work and provide key information at critical decision points.
• Automating. It can complete low-value, repetitive tasks to enable users to focus on more valuable work.
• Conversing. It can offer a better user experience with more efficient interactions.

Michael Bollinger, President of Grimco Canada, a leading wholesale sign supply manufacturer anddistributor with more than 50 locations across North America, said, "In ourbusiness, it is all about speed and agility. Being able to have data and AIallows us to get ahead of where everybody else is."

As one of the beta customers of the Infor ColemanDigital Assistant, Bollinger said Grimco is using Coleman to "take a look atinventory and find products more quickly, so we can make better decisions forour customers. We can quickly determine if we have a product in stock inToronto, or if we have product 'z' in stock in Montreal, for example. We canpull out this information quickly and speed our response times tocustomers." 

Rick Rider, Infor Coleman Product Director, said,"According to research from McKinsey & Company, the average interactionworker spends nearly 20 percent of their time looking for information ortracking down colleagues for help with specific tasks.¹ With the ability toquickly source data, automate repetitive processes, and help optimizeworkflows, Coleman can improve the work experience and help make workers moreproductive. This can result in significant savings for organizations."

The Infor Coleman Digital Assistant also is expectedto be integrated with Amazon Alexa for Business -- which provides tools tomanage Alexa devices, enroll users, and configure skills with added securityacross those devices -- by the end of 2018.

The Infor Coleman Digital Assistant will be available,upon GA, to Infor OS customers, and example skills will be available, atInforum, from product suites such as Infor CloudSuite Distribution (CSD), InforCloudSuite Industrial, Infor CRM, Infor LN, Infor M3, Infor CloudSuiteFinancials & Supply Management (CSF/FSM), and Infor Global Human Resources(GHR), among others.

InforColeman AI Platform
The Infor Coleman AIPlatform is a pervasive machine learning platform that operates below anapplication's surface. It mines data and uses powerful machine learning to helpimprove processes such as inventory management, transportation routing, andpredictive maintenance.

The Infor Coleman AI Platform represents a giant leapforward for AI at scale -- incorporating deep reservoirs of network data to helpserve the needs of human workers and to help make connected devices smarter.

The platform is specifically designed fornon-technical, business users and is built upon a foundation ofindustry-specific data. The Infor Coleman AI modeling environment is"digestible," in that it doesn't require as complex of a skillset as other AItooling, nor is it designed to require an exhaustive service engagement.Customers can better understand, relate, and trust the output, given the focuson user-experience and embedded connectivity to the entire applicable enterprisesuite.

"The Infor Coleman AI Platform can help customersbetter analyze their data and give them the ability to start asking questionsthey didn't even know they should be asking," Rider said. "It can automatetasks that were error-prone, which can help organizations save money byavoiding certain issues or taking advantage of specific opportunities morequickly."

Organizations can work to gain a competitive advantageby creating models from their proprietary data and experiences, and the Colemanplatform enables them to pass along advantages, up and down stream, using theirAI insights.

This can be particularly appealing to enterprises suchas Headwater Companies, LLC, a collection of groundwater distributors. Thiscollective and vested group works to ensure a focused groundwater distributionorganization that delivers quality products and leading brands to the industry,providing contractors with the availability and service to meet variousapplication challenges.

According to Matt Hendrickson, IT Director atHeadwater Companies, the Infor Coleman AI Platform's citizen developer toolsetand embedded nature make it unique and attractive.

"For us to take full advantage of an AI solution, itneeds to be easy to deploy and use," he said. "Coleman's embedded system withrapid deployment programs should help facilitate this. If we can leverage thesolution, without spending months or years on development, the rest will takecare of itself."

Hendrickson said that Headwater expects to use theColeman platform to help ensure it has products available when customers needthem.

"We are looking to the Infor Coleman AI Platform togive us predictive insights into when products will go out-of-stock,"Hendrickson said. "We want the platform to take action in advance of thestock-out. Maybe this is a notification to a buyer to change their buyinghabits because of certain weather events, such as droughts or hurricanes, forexample. Or, it could be a notification or integration with the supplier'ssystem, which they can use to adjust their manufacturing forecast.

It all ties back to one of our core strategies,"Hendrickson added. "We want to provide the product availability and service ourcustomers demand."

InforColeman Roadmap
Among the capabilities thatInfor expects to deliver with its Infor Coleman technology stack are barcodeand QR code scanning and custom image training, or image recognitiontechnologies, known as Infor Coleman Vision. Once a user presents Coleman witha scanned barcode or product image, for example, Coleman could return thedesired product information and ordering instructions, or any other applicableskill setup through the same Infor Coleman Digital Assistant skill builder.

Coleman is named after the inspiring physicist andmathematician Katherine Coleman Johnson, whose trail-blazing work at NASAhelped man land on the moon.

AdditionalInfor Coleman Resources

For more information about Infor Coleman AIcapabilities, click here.

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About Infor
Infor builds business software for specific industries in the cloud. With 17,000employees and over 68,000 customers in more than 170 countries, Infor softwareis designed for progress.  To learn more, please visit www.infor.com.

¹McKinsey& Company, McKinsey Global Institute Report, "The social economy: Unlockingvalue and productivity through social technologies," July 2012.

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