Infor CloudSuite is a cloud-based software suite tailored for healthcare organizations. It offers healthcare-specific functionality and analytics built on Amazon Web Services. Infor CloudSuite Healthcare provides financial management, supply chain, asset management, and other solutions tailored for healthcare. It aims to lower costs while providing current functionality and complying with regulations. Infor has added medical leadership and focuses on user experience, mobility, and predictive analytics to help healthcare organizations improve outcomes.

1. PRODUCT NOTE
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INFOR CLOUDSUITE
NO TWO CLOUDS SHOULD BE ALIKE
By P.J. Jakovljevic, TEC Principal Analyst
April 2015
www.technologyevaluation.com
Technology
Evaluation Centers

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Infor CloudSuite—No Two Clouds Should Be Alike
Industry focus and web-based cloud architecture are two major pillars of Infor’s
recently-minted strategy, with the third being developing beautiful software and
experiences that users enjoy. Figure 1 shows Infor CEO Charles Phillips talking
about these strategic pillars at the Inforum 2014 conference this past fall.
Figure 1. Infor strategic pillars
Perhaps the best example of that three-prong strategy at the Inforum 2014
conference was the announcement of Infor CloudSuite Healthcare, offering care
delivery organizations access to healthcare-specific functionality, analytics, and an
implementation accelerator for rapid time to value within a cloud environment.
Infor CloudSuite Healthcare builds upon Infor’s offerings available on Amazon
Web Services (AWS), as Infor is categorically known for not being in the business
of building its own expensive and taxing data centers.
Healthcare Functionality
As the Figure 2 depicts, Infor Healthcare’s footprint is quite broad, possibly
unmatchable in the market at this stage, in part due to former Lawson Software’s
long focus on the industry and multiple prudent acquisitions in the past. Namely,
there is surgical instrument management (via former Apexion Technologies),
nurse scheduling (via former VasTech), and clinical data integration (via former
Cloverleaf, often beating and/or replacing Oracle eGate and Orion Health in deals).
Most recently, Infor quietly acquired GRASP Systems for patient acuity, which puts

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it in a competitive situation with Kronos (former OptiLink) and GE Healthcare
(former API Healthcare).
Figure 2. Infor CloudSuite Healthcare footprint
Healthcare organizations can benefit from focused solutions for financial
management, supply chain management (SCM), enterprise asset management
(EAM), enterprise performance management (EPM), expense management,
continuous monitoring, enterprise resource planning (ERP) to electronic medical
record (EMR) connectivity, business intelligence (BI), analytics, and human capital
management (HCM) tailored specifically for healthcare organizations. In addition,
hospitals happen to have lots of assets and use plenty of energy, and the top-
notch Infor EAM suite comes in handy. Infor has a pilot hospital customer whose
assets (beds, rooms, offices, operating rooms, etc.) have been IP-enabled for
location information and whose doctors and nurses are equipped with wearable
devices for the Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. For example, an emergency
situation at a certain patient location can quickly be routed to the closest
available personnel with the required skills.

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Figure 3. Healthcare industry problems
Infor has recently added chief medical officer and chief nursing officer positions,
beefing up its healthcare DNA and understanding of the industry’s problems and
issues (see Figure 3). Infor CloudSuite Healthcare solutions can meet the needs of
the healthcare industry and healthcare-specific business processes, including
managing complex clinician pay plans, tracking and validating clinical
competencies and job-specific performance reviews, grants management,
coordination of recalls, patient charge capture, care workloads and assignments,
pre-built clinical system connections, and patient-specific supply reordering,
amongst many others.
In addition, through a flexible, subscription-based delivery model and employee-
based pricing, care delivery organizations can lower upfront IT expenditure and
total cost of ownership (TCO). The suite aims to significantly lower capital and
ongoing investment in IT, while still providing the most current functionality for
organizations to respond to changing needs, sustainable margins, and comply
with complex regulations and requirements—all while delivering high-quality care.
Contrary to manufacturing or retail sectors, healthcare organizations are still
unable to measure outcomes vs. costs and tasks, and it’s no wonder that
healthcare is envisioned to take an even 21 percent of the U.S. GDP in a few years
(from an already-hefty 18 percent, in spite of 50 million uninsured before
Obamacare). To that end, Infor is busy getting ready for the Health 3.0 framework
as seen in Figure 4. The aforementioned Cloverleaf integration suite seems to be a
hidden gem here, especially in light of hospitals going IP-addressable (medical
instruments, staff wearing devices, proximity beacons, etc.), so that the IoT and
big data concepts can help with optimized scheduling and advice. Infor Epiphany

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Interactive Advisor predictive analytics could also be used for advising the best
next step in treating patients. All newly developed and revamped Infor solutions
are contextual and location-aware.
Figure 4. Healthcare framework evolution
The solution also enables care delivery organizations to take on innovation at their
own pace, upgrading at a speed that accommodates their unique timing and
business needs with functionality specifically engineered for healthcare,
delivering a significantly different approach than other horizontal ERP solution
providers. Infor also offers its market-leading healthcare customer base, which
includes over 1,200 organizations using Infor Lawson for financial management,
SCM, HRM, payroll, and talent management. The UpgradeX Program is a clear and
simple path for upgrading or migrating older Infor Lawson solutions to the cloud,
allowing customers to take advantage of all of the functional enhancements in the
upcoming Infor Lawson/S3 10x along with the next-generation analytics, mobile,
and collaboration technologies. Customers will receive a completely new version
of the Infor Lawson/S3 solution running on AWS, plus all the services required for
a migration or upgrade: software, hardware, OS licenses, IT operations, and yearly
upgrades executed by Infor.

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Nothing Without Compelling User Experience
Marc Scibelli, Infor’s chief creative officer who heads the internal Hook & Loop
creative agency with about 200 designers (up from only 15 in 2013), is always
happy to talk about Infor software’s current and upcoming look and feel. The
original SoHo user experience with the Ming.le social networking tool was not
only about a snazzy consumer-like social user interface (UI), but also about being
useful and sending contextual info to employees. The true value of social tools
and collaboration is evident when they help concrete business processes and
solve actual situations/issues, e.g., field service work, product development work,
order management and fulfillment, etc. To that end, sharing posts creates
newsfeeds for relevant folks in Ming.le, while the social business graph capability
means following not only people, but also assets, orders, warehouses, etc.
Infor’s upcoming user experience is about a minimalist UI that still delivers a lot.
More information doesn’t improve usability; clarity does, and thus the focus is on
ruthlessly eliminating bloat. In the past, many have designed products for only the
so-called power users, and the majority of casual users had to live with the
“tyranny of the super users.” Infor’s user experience is designed for a mobile
world, but not necessarily “mobile first,” as each device has its best purposes (and
proper real estate) for certain situations. The upcoming Glide feature will leverage
predictive analytics for a moving/changing UI based on the context, whereby the
Infor ION middleware application programming interface (API) will provide
intelligent routing to the proper screens.
Infor’s current SoHo release includes configuration catalogs, search without losing
a search momentum (facet search tags), and contextual relationships (anchor–
items of relations) to account for changing contexts. For example, in Figure 5,
medical staff is the anchor, while their patients and procedures are related.
But if one drills down into, say, Patient CG (identified by initials only, due to the
HIPPA privacy regulations; see Figure 6), the patient becomes the anchor with lots
of related items on the right side of the screen.

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Figure 5. Infor Healthcare Workforce Screen
Figure 6. Infor Healthcare Workforce Screen

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In Conclusion
Healthcare is Infor’s hottest vertical, where the vendor rules in many market share
metrics: 200 hospitals in seven Canadian provinces, 81 out of 98 public hospitals
in the Netherlands, 21 of 25 integrated delivery networks (IDNs), 72 percent of
the U.S. hospitals with more than 150 beds, five out of six best supply chain
departments of the year. In total, there are over 5,000 healthcare provider
customers, touching over 250 million lives in over 500 major cities and metro
areas.
Reportedly, 30 out 34 recent ERP evaluations have lately selected Infor Healthcare,
typically beating Oracle and Workday. This should be a blueprint for Infor on how
best to compete in its other industries of focus, such as automotive, food, public
sector, etc.

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