Infor Unveils New CRM Solution Specifically for Companies on IBM System i Platforms

Infor today announced the availability of Infor CRM i Edition, a new solution that provides enhanced customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities to customers with Infor enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions on IBM System i platforms. The new solution can help Infor's more than 14,000 System i customers create growth and loyalty through heightened customer dialogue, increased revenue, reduced costs, and enhanced customer service.

CRM i Edition, linked with Infor's ERP products, provides Infor customers a single, integrated view of customer-related information such as credit limits, financial transactions, orders, quotes, shipments, and more. End users can access the solution via their Internet browser, ensuring data availability anywhere, anytime. The solution further simplifies use by providing CRM data to users through a single access point. CRM i Edition has robust capabilities for campaign management, opportunity management, sales process management, and quotation and order management.

"Infor CRM i Edition helps our System i customers leverage their ERP data with new capabilities that will help them increase sales revenue, reduce sales costs, expand data visibility, enhance forecast accuracy, and improve customer service," said Kevin Piotrowski, director of System i solution marketing, Infor. "Providing innovation and support to our large installed base of System i customers is an important priority and commitment for Infor and a major factor behind our recent establishment of a business unit dedicated to our worldwide base of customers who use IBM System i."

CRM i Edition enables companies to manage campaigns using CRM and ERP data to easily target subsets of their customers with offers tailored to specific wants and needs. Using e-mail, call lists for telesales and the mail merge function, the solution enables companies to better define and execute campaigns. Additionally, the solution provides the ability to manage marketing events, such as invitations, response tracking and post-event surveys, and also measure a campaign's success.

With the solution's sales process management functionality, companies can use multiple sales practices as part of an overall CRM program. User-defined sales processes include additional sales to an existing customer, service without a contract, maintenance renewal, sales to a prospect, sales through a partner or reseller, and major account sales. In each instance, a record is created for every opportunity, enabling users to review status using various parameters such as deal value, predicted close date and others.

Additional functionality in Infor CRM i Edition enables users to manage quotations and orders by taking advantage of the abundant information contained in the company's existing ERP system. This data includes pricing, discounting, promotions, sourcing, and more. Using this data, the solution simplifies the prospect-to-customer and quote-to-order conversion processes, enabling users to increase the number of inquiries that become orders. This conversion rate is also boosted by the solution's opportunity management capabilities, which helps improve close rates and shorten sales cycles.