Hans Mueller on the Infor Resources You Might Be Missing

[00:00:04] Infor puts out a ton of material for its customers, but finding the right resource isn't always that easy. Hans Mueller joins RPI Tech Connect to map it all out and share what he's building here next at RPI.

[00:00:32] Hello and thank you for tuning in to RPI Tech Connect. I'm your host Chris Arian. Today we're going to be talking about resources that Infor customers have available to them. There's a lot of material out there, but it lives in a lot of different places. Here to guide us through all of it is none other than Mr. Hans Mueller, Director of Infor Solutions here at RPI and a known entity throughout the Infor and Lawson community.

[00:00:56] Hans has spent years on the Infor side running user groups and hosting customer calls, so he has seen firsthand where customers get stuck and where they should turn to. So Hans, it's great to have you on the program. How are you, sir? Hans Mueller. I'm good. Thanks very much for having me, Chris. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Hans Mueller. I have been around the Lawson and Infor world, as Chris said, for almost three decades now.

[00:01:23] I was 10 years a customer with Friendly Ice Cream, which is a restaurant company that was located in the Northeast and was a longtime Lawson customer for many years. And then I came over to Lawson and then I was part of Infor when Lawson was acquired by Infor. So I spent about 20 years there and just recently came over here to RPI. And it's been a great journey and a great transition.

[00:01:50] And I'm very excited about the work that we're doing and to be on the show today. Excellent, Hans. I know that everybody at RPI is happy to have you here aboard the ship. Just hearing a little bit about your background and that trajectory you've made throughout your career from the from Friendly's to Lawson to Infor and now working as a partner consultant. Like super, super cool. Like you've got a lot of industry knowledge and expertise that I can't even begin to comprehend if I'm being honest.

[00:02:22] So let's talk about the Infor ecosystem in terms of resources. There's a lot out there and sometimes it can feel overwhelming. Why do you think that is? Well, I think what it starts with is Infor does a really good job of producing a ton of collateral around their products.

[00:02:44] There is endless amounts of information, whether it's product documentation, whether it's training, whether it's KB articles, whether it's, you know, just blog posts or, you know, webinar recordings. Or there's just a ton going on. I mean, you have a company that has 18,000 people. You have a whole multiple sets of product portfolios. And so there's just a ton of information that's out there in the ecosystem.

[00:03:14] The problem is for someone who's doing their day job at a customer who, you know, really just cares about their particular role, their particular, the screens they go to every day, the way they work in the application. So the solution to navigate all that and to find what's relevant for me is a challenge, right? And that's the biggest problem is that there is almost too much information. It's information overload. I just want what I want, right?

[00:03:44] I just want to see what's relevant to me. And so navigating your way through all of the madness, all of the – is really the challenge for most customers. Where should they begin their journey? Well, so a couple years ago, Infor decided to move to a biannual release cycle.

[00:04:05] And that change actually prompted a way for customers to be able to have a good starting point to find this information. Prior to that, we had releases that were coming out, you know, every month. You know, some products would release every week. Some products would release every month. And some would release every quarter. And it was – you know, you had to be on constant awareness that there might be something coming that's going to affect what you're doing.

[00:04:36] The change to everybody releasing on this biannual cycle allowed for some organization to kind of be put in place. And one of the biggest changes that came out of that was what's called the release center. And the release center is this great starting area that's out on Infor Concierge. Anybody can navigate to it. You can go to the concierge area. You can click on release center.

[00:05:00] And it will give you the place to go, you know, for the next step and the next step and the next step, right? So it points the way to where all the release information is. It points the way to where the release highlights are. And it also points the way to where training and documentation are for those specific products that you care about, right? So the nice thing is, you know, Infor has a ton of products. But, you know, I may be a healthcare company and I don't have, you know, all those products.

[00:05:30] I only have maybe 10 of the products that are listed on the whole portfolio of Infor's manifest, right? So I'm only going to see those 10 products that my company owns. And so already I'm navigating, you know, I'm cutting the list of information down to where I want to be. And then from there I can pick and choose where I go next. But that's the perfect place to start for anybody who's trying to navigate through all of the release information.

[00:05:59] So the release center, like regardless of like your role, like if you're supply chain or HCM or technical, like you can go there and be able to navigate the things that are important to you? Yeah. So it's a start. It's not that refined to that. And so there's still a lot of work to do.

[00:06:22] So, yes, you know, if I'm an FSM user, then, yes, I can now go to the FSM areas within those other parts of the documentation and training, right? It will take me to those areas. If I'm an HCM user, same, right?

[00:06:44] But if I'm like, say, a supply chain customer, right, and I work, let's say I work in receiving and I only care about, you know, that particular area of the application, the release center is not going to take me to receiving, right? It's going to take me to financials and supply management. I'm going to have to then navigate the rest of the way down and cut out the pieces that only apply to me.

[00:07:09] So that's like the next step that needs to happen within enforced evolution. But the information is there. And at least now you can get to those areas where you don't have to do all the work. You only have to do part of the work. Okay. All right. Progress. Moving in the right direction. Yeah. Progress. Yes. Let's go.

[00:07:37] So you mentioned there the October CE you just passed. Infor moved to the biannual release. Was that two, three years ago now? Do you recall? I think it was in 2022, 2023. So, yeah, yeah. Three or four years ago. Yep. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about what's included in those releases. Like, making it, you know, twice a year just, you know, as a non-practitioner, that feels a lot more manageable.

[00:08:05] Like, knowing that you can plan around April and October. What kind of stuff, like, that comes out as a part of those releases? Yeah. So what the change was, and it is a lot more manageable now, right? So what the change is, was that in every April and October, InforNow releases the new features, right? Okay.

[00:08:31] So new features, major changes, all those things are going to come in two releases per year, right? So you can now set up, from a customer perspective, you can set up your planning cycles around, okay, twice a year I'm going to have to go through, you know, somewhat of a significant change management exercise. You know, I'm going to have to test my interfaces. I'm going to have to worry about new features coming in.

[00:09:00] Maybe there's some significant bug fixes or regulatory changes that come in. Those type of major things are going to come April and October. The rest of the year, on a monthly basis, there are still releases that you need to be concerned with, but those are more service releases. And if you think about it from, like, your iPhone perspective, right?

[00:09:24] It's, you know, Apple pushes out a change, and maybe it's a .1 release, right, or .2, and you just take it. It tells you there's a change. You just take it, and, you know, and it comes, right? Right, right? And that's a really good point, actually. Yes. It's kind of the same concept, and that's on a month-to-month basis, right? And so, but on, but when, like, iOS 27.0 comes out, right?

[00:09:53] That, you know, now you're going to have a whole, yeah, everything moves around and things change. And so that's your April and October. So those are your changes that are coming in and how they're coming in.

[00:10:04] The other thing that's nice now that there is a designated time to deliver these new features is that the product teams now have put in place, you know, largely based on customer requests, right, is that these changes are optional, right, at the beginning. They're toggled, right? So you can go in and you can, things are going to be toggled off.

[00:10:29] You know, you're going to be made aware of them and say, hey, there's a great new user experience within, you know, employee and manager self-service. We've redesigned the UI and we're delivering these new workspaces and it's going to be great for your end users and your managers and so on and so forth. But you don't have to take it that moment. Like the day after the October release, you know, it's not popping up and all of a sudden they're having to, you know, scramble and deal with that, right? So they can turn it off.

[00:10:59] It comes in turned off and they can decide, hey, okay, you know, we've been testing this already. You know, we've seen this, you know, maybe we're going to go through a couple more months of test cycle, right, and push it out to, you know, a smaller group of users and then we're going to toggle it on for everybody. And so it gives the customers a lot more control. But those changes are all coming in, you know, as part of those feature releases.

[00:11:25] There's a lot more launch activity around those feature releases. So there's, you know, webinars and prep sessions and release highlight sessions and release training that's built to coincide with those major releases. And then the ones in between the other 10 months of the year, those are bug fixes. Those are, you know, hey, we have to push something in because maybe, you know, there's some regulatory that's delivered then because of requirements.

[00:11:53] But it's usually stuff that's behind the scenes. It's not significant to the end user. And then the last thing that customers need to be aware of are supplementals. And supplementals are the real goal of a supplemental release. And the reason why they're not widely publicized.

[00:12:12] I mean, if you track on the release KBs that are listed in the release center, there is, if you subscribe to those KBs, there's a listing of, hey, we're going to do a supplemental release. And it's going to be delivered at this time, this place. Supplemental releases don't take the system down, right? They're delivered behind the scenes.

[00:12:36] And they're usually to fix something that's critical for, you know, some customer has reported there's an issue. We'll use, like, in purchasing. They found some critical issue. We need to get that fixed, right? And so the info will deliver that. And it will, it should be invisible to everyone. You just continue on with your day. But the awareness is at least made that we're fixing that bug.

[00:13:02] So those supplemental updates you're talking about, are those, like, a result of, like, the known issues identified as part of, like, the major releases? Yes. Yes. So for anybody who's not aware, and I'm certainly hoping that most are aware, is there is a KB. There's usually one KB that's associated with every major set of products that's out that Infor has.

[00:13:27] And so for financial supply management, landmark applications, HCM, there is what's called the known issues KB. It's linked off of the release KB. And what the purpose of that knowledge-based article is, is it's constantly being updated by the support team. And the support team basically says, we've become aware of an issue that's going to affect three or more customers.

[00:13:55] So it's not every issue that's out there, but it's three or more customers, right? So if we know that this issue in GL is going to be, you know, critical, and we're working on it, we're aware of it. You know, part of it is awareness for customers to say, don't spin your tires, you know, trying to diagnose why you're having this issue,

[00:14:19] because we're already aware of it, you know, here's what we know, here's how, you know, what the, what the cause, you know, what the symptoms are, what the cause is, what the message you might be seeing is, you know, if there's any known workaround, we'll give you that information. And here's when we think we're going to be able to fix it, you know, whether it's, you know, a week, two weeks, you know, a month, could be longer, because it could, you know, but they'll give all of that information in that KB article.

[00:14:47] And that will be constantly updated and constantly rotated. So that's one that absolutely needs to be subscribed to, because every time there's an update, they'll push, they'll push a notice out to anybody who's subscribed. So you'll know, hey, you know, they made a change to one of the known issues, a new one popped on, or, you know, one's been updated, and it's been maybe closed out, or, hey, we know we're going to deliver the fix for this, or whatever.

[00:15:12] I was going to ask you, like, is there a way to subscribe or like get emails about these known issues, KB? And you answered my question. Yeah, so all KB articles have two functions that are on every knowledge-based article, right? One is you can favorite it, right? So it pops up into your lists every single time when you log into the customer portal. And, hey, these are the ones that are most important to me, ones I need to check most often, right?

[00:15:41] I'm going to, I can favorite them, just like a bookmark. The other one, the other one is subscribe. And subscribe is anytime anybody makes a change, it pushes a message out. Now, it would be nice if the message said what the change was, but it doesn't. What does it say? It says this article has been updated, and then you have to go into the article and figure out why.

[00:16:05] Now, depending on the author, and most of the authors in the service industries area, you know, financials, HCM, Landmark, most of the authors are pretty good. And what they put on it is a change log. So you can look at the change log and you say, okay, this part, this was the last update that was made. Not everyone does that, but most of them do. Wow, okay. Learning a lot of great stuff from you here today, Hans. This is awesome.

[00:16:35] Thank you. So let's talk about some of the new stuff that just came out and maybe is on the horizon. This is a tech podcast. AI comes up. What's going on with AI as part of the October CEO? Is there anything worth calling out? There's a lot, yes.

[00:16:54] So I think it's been well known that Infor has been working, you know, on getting generative AI to work with all of their applications. It's been, I can tell you from my former time there, that it's been about a two-year journey of work that started, you know, at the very basic level. So there was the Embedded Experience that already came out.

[00:17:21] And basically what the Embedded Experience was, was, you know, you could use generative AI to help you with text fields, right? So, for example, if you were trying to write a job description for a new role within your organization and you didn't know necessarily where to start,

[00:17:43] from within the application you could use generative AI to say, hey, write me a job description for a nurse practitioner, you know, with five years experience, blah, blah, blah, this and that. And it would go out and it would write you, you know, somewhat, you know, a good job description. And then you could tweak it. You didn't have to start from scratch. So that capability has been around now for, I think, at least a year. And available to customers.

[00:18:10] And so there's various fields throughout the application that have that capability. But that's not where the real power was. The real power is getting, you know, agents to do work, right? To be able to answer questions. You know, the stuff that, you know, you and I probably do on our phones every day with, you know, whether it's Claude or Grock or whatever, right?

[00:18:35] You know, you, I know that I use it with my kids and their homework all the time, right? They think I know everything. Hold on there, Henry. Let me get that answer for you. Like, I'm sorry. You know, I was really good at math one day, you know, at one point in the past. But I don't remember how to do quadratic formulas anymore, you know?

[00:19:00] So let's sit down and maybe we could get a, you know, quick cheat sheet and teach dad how to do a quadratic. I can explain it to you, right? So that kind of stuff. The other one that was really funny is my son was learning about Supreme Court cases. And in the past, you know, like in the 1800s. And I'm like, dude, I don't know. So I get them, you know, but it's great.

[00:19:28] You can pull up, tell me about, you know, 1821, you know, U.S. versus whatever. And it will give you a short summary of the case and why it was important to history and, you know, all that stuff. So that's the kind of stuff that need, you know, is going to help end users, right? So Infor has been building different agents, lots of different agents.

[00:19:53] And they also have been exercising what's called the Gen AI assistant, which is that chat bot type back and forth conversational UI. And when I was there, my team was running early adopter programs around that with all of the different application groups. And so now in the October release, there's a number of things that are now available to customers, to all customers.

[00:20:22] So number one, the most important thing for all customers, regardless of, you know, what suite you're on, what applications you run, as long as you're in the multi-tenant cloud, you can go in and you can turn on what's called the public knowledge hub. The public knowledge hub doesn't cost any money, doesn't require velocity suite, doesn't require any additional licensing. It's just there.

[00:20:48] And basically what it does is you have to go, you have to enable it. All right. So it doesn't just get turned on. It's another one of those toggled features. And then you can control it via security. So you don't have to roll it out to every single one of your end users if you don't want to, if you just want to roll it out to a group.

[00:21:04] But it's basically using the Gen AI assistant against all of Infor's documentation to be able to query questions, how-to questions. Because the most calls that come into the support center at Infor are how-to questions. How do I create, you know, a new vendor?

[00:21:29] How do I, you know, set up, I don't even know. How do I, you know, pay an invoice? You know, like very basic, right? But, or you can get into more complex things. How do I set up, you know, ION for the first time, right? So those things are all within the documentation.

[00:21:58] They're just, again, information overload, they're buried out there, right? You can go to docs.info.com and you can search. And, you know, you could maybe, you know, find it. Now you have, you know, the power of AI to help you go find that answer, right? Wow. And so that's available, like I said, to any customer for free. Right now. How do they turn that on again? You go somewhere? There's a six easy steps.

[00:22:27] We can detail that somewhere else if we need to. Give them the link, but there's a KB article that has six steps that they need to do. And I'm told it's a five-minute task, you know, so, and I believe that. Trusted sources, right? But it is, you know, it does have to be turned on. So that's for everyone. Then there's a whole bunch more if you buy the Velocity Suite. And you have to buy the Velocity Suite, right?

[00:22:54] So for customers that might not know, the Velocity Suite is a set of tools that Infor has developed that all are around, you know, taking your Cloud Suite kind of to the next level and applying these newer, more powerful technologies on top of your general ERP processing, right? So there's about six or seven tools that come with the Velocity Suite. They all come packaged together.

[00:23:23] You get the capabilities of all of them, and many of them work together. That's why it's packaged together. Like, a lot of the stuff that they do, it's not one tool exercising things. It's, you know, three or four tools working in conjunction together to make the solution happen. And so in that, when you license that, you get all of the agents that come that they've developed, and there's hundreds of them.

[00:23:49] There's hundreds of agents that have been developed for financials and supply management, for HCM, and a number of customers have already been using these. And it's great. I mean, you can go out and you can ask questions. You know, hey, give me a list of my top, my most outstanding vendors. How much do I owe them? And, you know, who are the key contacts at those sites, right?

[00:24:18] Now, you could go and write that query, you know, have somebody in IT spend, you know, days writing that query, right? And come up with and piece it all together and give the CEO a report. Or he could just ask the question, you know, and get a list in, you know, a minute and 30 seconds to a minute or whatever and have that at his fingertips. And, okay, drill in and tell me, okay, Coca-Cola is one of them. You know, they haven't paid us.

[00:24:45] Or, you know, we owe them a bunch of money or whatever, right? And so I could dig in and say, well, show me the last five invoices. What's, you know? So, like, I can have a conversation and dig deeper and dig deeper without ever going back to IT. And so most of the agents that are developed today so far are not update. They're non-update. They're just queries. But the update ones are coming, right?

[00:25:14] The update ones are where even more power is, where I can, you know, basically tell them, okay, go run a check cycle for, you know, and I don't have to key it in. Now, Infor is very big about wanting to keep the human in the loop and not just let the agent go do everything, right? So there are controls on these. There are guidelines on these. You can give it as much power as you want to give it.

[00:25:42] But, again, a lot of capabilities that are available with the October release if you buy VelocitySum. So the AI query, I think there's a lot of value in that, too, and that it creates self-service pathways for users, right? Like, it's allowing them to be able to do more on their own, which is good.

[00:26:04] Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, from most users of the system don't want to be in the system. They don't ever want to. They don't. Why am I here? They don't want to, you know, like, they need the system, but they don't want to be in it, right? They don't want to be sitting at a computer looking at a screen, right? Tell me my last paycheck. Tell me why my deductions changed, right? Tell me how much vacation time I got left this year.

[00:26:34] Yeah. Or, you know, like, okay, for a nursing, you know, if you're a nursing supervisor, tell me all the shifts that remain open this weekend that I need to cover. Like, again, you could go into the system, log in, look at a report, blah, blah, blah. But that takes time. You're walking the floor. You're, like, dealing with, you know, seven other headaches that are not at a computer screen. So true. Yeah. So these are things to just cut that time down, right?

[00:27:03] And so these features you're talking about here, like the CU and the AI components that we discussed, this is all detailed in, like, the release notes or? Yeah. I know you know this, but, like, how do other people come to know this? They listen to this podcast or? So, yes. Yes and no. Again, I think this goes back to, partially goes back, the reason I laugh, it goes back to our issue of information overload. Yeah.

[00:27:33] So the first place that, when there's a major release like October, and, you know, I know October's here, right? But we can talk about for customers, here's the October experience and here's what you need to do coming up for April, right? Be prepared for April. So the first exposure that customers will get, the general customer population will get, right?

[00:27:56] If you're not part of an early adopter program or you're not part of a, you know, like some kind of industry council where you get kind of more advanced warning of these things. But the first time you'll hear about it is what is called, well, the first place you can go is the roadmap, right? Infor puts out roadmaps. They publish them. They don't really do roadmap sessions anymore. They publish the roadmaps out on Concierge.

[00:28:22] So there's an area also within the release center, separate page, but that has product roadmaps. And they're supposed to be updated at least once a year, sometimes twice a year, depending on the product. And it's a slide deck, but it gives you kind of a visual of what's coming, you know, in the future. And if you have any questions about that, you can go, you have access to people, right? I mean, you can go, you should be proactive and go ask, right?

[00:28:52] Whether it's your account executive, your customer success person, you know, whoever, you should be asking those questions. Right? Okay. If you, if you're, if, hey, hey, that looks good. I'm interested in that. You know, like let's, you know, like let's, you know, okay. But, but then fast forward to, let's, let's talk about October, right? In the beginning of September, Infor schedules, what are called release highlight session. Okay.

[00:29:21] This is a one day set of sessions. And yes, it's a day. It's like four or five hours, but it's great content and it's recorded. And so if you don't want to sit there, you don't have to sit there, but sign up and get the recording or go out and listen to the recording later. Um, you know, it's, it tells you it's the product team themselves going through.

[00:29:47] Here's all the things that you should care about in the release. Right? October is going to deliver ABCD, you know, like these 15 things. And you, and this is why you should care about them. And this is who the target audience is for them. Right? You know, and some of them might not be applicable to you. Um, now there's way more than 15 things in that release, but those are, they've already given you the big ones. Right? Hey, this is, this is the stuff you should care about.

[00:30:17] Right? And why it's going to help you in your, in your, you know, organization. Cool. Um, yeah, so that's, that's the first place to go. And then all from there comes this trickle effect of all the rest of the stuff. And so there is a complex document that's called the release report that has everything in it, which is a big, huge spreadsheet. That you have to read and interpret and, you know, slice and dice and do what you need to do.

[00:30:46] So you can do that. I'm not saying don't, I'm just saying, but. You've been given the starting point and the big highlights. And, and so, um, when we're talking about something like AI, that was definitely in the release highlights deck. Right? So it's going to give you a whole bunch of information. These are what these agents are. Here's how you can go get more information about them. Here's some trainings you can go listen to. Here's some sessions, you know, you could, you know, webinars you could have attended. You know, so all that stuff is, is there.

[00:31:16] Right? Right. Uh, and made available if you were attending that release highlights. Yeah. Folks listening in, add that to your calendar or be on the lookout for it leading up to March. Yep. It'll. So for April, it'll be at the beginning of March. It's the, it's, uh, it's the month before the release at the very, the very first week of that month. Okay, cool. Yeah. Add it to your calendars, folks. This is something you're not going to want to miss.

[00:31:45] I want to talk now Hans about different types of groups that, that, that are available for people to join and kind of like communicate with others. Reference groups, focus groups, early adopter programs. What do you have to share about those? Yeah. So I had mentioned in what we were just, you know, we're talking about early awareness to things and. You know, the release highlights, like I said, is for the, the general population, right. Of customers.

[00:32:13] But there's many customers who participate in activities where you get awareness a lot earlier. And, and, you know, from my experience in, in working, uh, almost 20 years at Infor, it's the same group of customers always attending those early things. Always taking advantage of those early things. And there's this whole other group of customers that either doesn't know about it.

[00:32:41] Maybe, maybe doesn't have time for it, which is fine. Right. Um, but, um, that never seems to get into that quote unquote inner circle. And then they wonder why they don't, they're not aware of this stuff. Right. So, so all, all of these groups, um, I like to put into the heading of, you know, their customer collaboration activities. Right.

[00:33:02] So there's, there's a whole host of things that Infor does to raise awareness and get feedback from customers at different points in the product development cycle. Um, so there are, and, and the path to all of them is through your customer success executive. Right. You're, that person works for you. You're paying a, uh, a great deal of money every year for that person to help you.

[00:33:32] Um, please lean on him and, you know, on, on them and try and get as much information about these programs as possible. Right. So number one, um, there's an industry council. Um, industry councils are just like the name describes is, you know, are centered around an industry. And it's usually about, you know, 10 or 12 customers, let's say in healthcare, healthcare industry council.

[00:34:00] And those customers, uh, meet regularly with the strategists and the product leaders, um, at Infor. And they talk about the trends in healthcare and where the industry is going. What are the big changes that need to be addressed in the software that in order to take, you know, to meet those demands that are going on in the industry, in the business.

[00:34:28] Um, and, and so it's a great group. Now it's a tight group, right? It doesn't mean that everybody who raises their hand is going to get a seat at the table, but it's certainly something, if you're interested in participating in something like that, you need to raise your hand and talk to your customer success executive. Right.

[00:34:43] So that's one kind of, if you're, if you're kind of more about, you know, the healthcare industry or there's a public sector one, there's a, um, K through 12 one, you know, those, those type of boards, um, existed in for.

[00:35:00] Um, a lot, a lot of what I'm hearing here, Hans, is that there's a lot of resources out there, but part of like being in the know and knowing what's coming and being engaged is like part of that is like raising your hand and being proactive. It sounds like. Oh, absolutely. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. So if you think about it, um, any partnership between a vendor and a customer is really a two way street, right?

[00:35:28] You could go out and you could buy, um, let's use a silly example, right? I go out and I buy milk, right? And I buy milk from the grocery store and some vendor provided it. Right. And let's say it was hood. Hood is a big milk manufacturer here in the Northeast.

[00:35:48] Um, I take it home and maybe I don't like their product and I, and I complain about it to my wife and you know, or maybe I stopped buying it and I buy somebody else's, but maybe it's the cheapest one and it's okay. And I just have some, like if I don't never talk to, to the vendor and, and have a conversation with them, I'm never going to get any changes to it. Right. I'm never going to get my, my, my views might be ignored. Right. That, that happens all the time.

[00:36:17] But if I don't ever raise my hand to, Hey, hood. Hey, you know what? There's going to be a milk taste testing in the future. We're going to change it up. The recipe. Right. And it's a dumb example, but you get where I'm going. I do. I think it's great. So, so the same thing is true. The same thing is true at Infor, right? It's, it's just, you have invested millions of dollars in your software that is running your organization, right?

[00:36:47] Running your business. And, you know, so maybe take a vested interest and raising your hand to be part of things that might need improving. Right. So when I was there, we ran, we ran a whole bunch of people would come to us all the time because I, my team was responsible for a lot of customer collaboration activities. And, you know, Hey, we want to run a focus group. We want to talk about improvements to the release cycle. Like let's talk to a group of customers.

[00:37:18] And I remember this exercise, right? We had, you know, we went out to the customer success folks and we're like, Hey, give us some of your best customers, you know, that have been the most vocal about this activity. But, you know, like, you know, let's reach out to them. Let's see if they'll participate. We had a list of probably 60, 70 customers that the CSE team put together. And then we pulled, we went out and asked them, you know, Hey, we're going to put together these focus groups. You want to participate?

[00:37:48] Chris, we were lucky if we got, you know, 10 to 15 to participate, you know, maybe 20 on a good day. Right. So all those 70 people, and these were the 70 most theoretically most active people talking about a specific subject when push came to shove, didn't show up at the table. Right. So show up at the table because the ones who do influence change. There were so many great ideas, great changes that came out of that group.

[00:38:17] And they influenced, you know, how the release center looks today, how release KBs look today, you know, how the release report looks today. It's a great activity. We got great feedback. Our customers have great ideas, but they have to show up at the table and exercise those ideas. Right. Don't just throw it into the wind, you know, come and participate. Same thing with early adopter programs. You know, early adopter programs takes it is obviously much more of a commitment than showing up to a focus group meeting. Right.

[00:38:47] You're committing to taking early product and testing it and, you know, exercising it and validating it and making sure that it's going to work in a real world environment. And, you know, I understand the commitment. It's it's a lot. Right. But at the end of the day, if it's if it's software that you've been looking for, it's filling a gap that you need filled.

[00:39:12] Or if you're ultimately going to take this software later, like why not get in on the ground floor, help develop it, help finish it out, have a direct path to the developer who's talking, who's building it and get your voice heard. Like, hey, you know, Joe, I don't like the way your your this, you know, the layout of this works. Like the steps don't make sense.

[00:39:40] Like this window pops open and this comes over here. Like it doesn't make sense to me. That's not saving me any time. Like and you that's your chance, because when it comes out later, you know, you've kind of lost that chance or it's much harder. It's much harder. Right. So. It's a lot to get involved, right?

[00:40:03] It's a lot to get involved early, but there are a ton of avenues for customers to get involved early and participate and influence the product, influence change at Infor. There's people who are on the product side who I just remember many, many conversations. They'd come and they'd say, we want to improve this area of the product, you know, but nobody wants to sign up for the early doctor program.

[00:40:32] And so it was difficult. Right. Right. You know, like they can only do so much without, you know, a willing, willing partners on the other side. So what I'm so like getting involved, really important here. And like there's other places to get involved to, right? Like across the Infor community, whether that's with like third party partners or user groups and such. Right. Like let's talk. How do those differ from what we're talking about here? Would you say?

[00:41:01] They're just an extension, right? And it's actually, those are probably early pathways into the programs we just discussed. Okay. So user groups, for example, Lawson back in the day had this very robust user group community all throughout the country.

[00:41:25] And then when Lawson acquired Intentia or the M3 products over in Sweden, that company, they had a great network of user groups in Europe. And these user groups were very robust, had wide followings. You'd go meet together physically in the same place, you know, like not virtually.

[00:41:51] And you would, you know, sit in a room and there'd be some sessions that were presented maybe on new functionality or on tips and tricks or best practices. But most of the work that's done at the user group meeting is in the networking at lunch or in the hallway or in the conversation. And that happens after the session is over.

[00:42:16] And so all of those conversations are where a product person and a customer can get together now and start to spitball these ideas, right? Hey, I sat in a session about generative AI, you know, two years ago. And it was really interesting to me. And I saw the value of what it was going to be for my organization.

[00:42:42] So I wanted to make sure that I understood Infor's evolution there. And I checked in with the product manager for the next, you know, three months, six months, whatever. And then when they opened the early adopter program, I raised my hand because I was interested because I had learned about it at the user group meeting, you know, six months before. Right. And I already had that relationship created. I already they already knew of my interest level. And it was a pretty quick win.

[00:43:10] I could get in. I could I was part of the program. And now I started, you know, having more conversations, testing it out, you know, giving my feedback, so on and so forth.

[00:43:19] So that conversation that happened at the user group meeting opened the door to, you know, an adopt an early adoption curve that probably has that same customer now going live with that software way faster than anybody else, you know, who waited until October to get into that conversation cycle. Right. So that's really the power of the user group.

[00:43:45] The other power is I can find other customers that are like me. And it doesn't have to be exactly like me. Right. It would be great. You know, like I go I'm I'm doing I'm a health care company. I'm running X, Y and Z, you know, business process. I, you know, I work in accounts payable and, you know, I have these business problems. And, you know, hey, look at sitting in the same room in an AP session at the user group meeting.

[00:44:15] I bump into somebody who has the same problems. Right. Or it could have been somebody from. You know, a county office or, you know, a city office or, you know, or a school district who also has a similar problem. Maybe it's not identical, but we have the same and we've tackled it. Right. Right. Hey, this is how we did it.

[00:44:41] You know, I know we're not exactly the same from a business standpoint, but we we approached it with this technology, this approach. And maybe that will work for you. Right. Maybe it won't. But at least it gets your wheels spinning. Right. Those conversations happen and they don't happen as easily in a virtual arena. They don't. They don't. That's like that's so that's the power of a user group.

[00:45:07] And, you know, the user groups took a huge hit for two reasons. One, user groups took a huge hit because of. The change in the product. Right. Right. When when when when Infor launched financial supply management is radically different than Lawson and the old products. Most of the customers were running Lawson. New customers were starting to run financial supply FSM. Right. And and.

[00:45:36] But they weren't all in the New York area. They weren't all in the Chicago area. Right. They're not all going to go to the same user group meeting. And so there was a gap. For a period of time until there was enough customers on FSM that would show up at a user group meeting that that took that was a multi year gap that that impacted the user groups. Right. And, you know, Infor wants to send out resources to support the user group, but they don't want to send out.

[00:46:06] Resources to talk about a legacy product that's going away. Right. They want to talk about the new exciting stuff that they're building. Right. And there's only five people in the room who are running that new stuff. Right. So it's hard. It's tough. Yeah. And that's that's I know we're going to talk about innovation insights. That's where innovation insights came out of was the need to fill that gap. The Hans call. The Hans call. Yeah. The.

[00:46:33] But the other big hit that user groups took was obviously COVID. Right. Nobody wanted to travel. Nobody wanted to meet face to face. And so there was that just contributed to the gap. So they're trying to rebuild now. I was just at the West Coast user group. There was over 100 people there. You know, it was great. So they're starting to come to build back up and become more useful. I think there's most of the customers now are on the multi-tenant cloud platform. So they're all talking the same language.

[00:47:03] They're all talking about the same products. So, you know, that those issues are behind us. So I hope that that trend continues and those in-person user groups continue to grow and flourish because there's a tremendous value there. I'm glad you brought up innovation insights because I think we're going to be kicking off some iteration of that here at RPI very soon. That's correct. Yes, Hans? Yeah. Yeah. I'm really excited.

[00:47:31] We're going to do we're going to do a new call. Right. An RPI call. Yeah. Hanging with Hans. Hanging with Hans. Hanging with Hans. Let's go. And, you know, obviously want to build off of off of the legacy. I mean, the innovation insights call continues at Infor. It's it's a great, great tool. My my old teammates run it.

[00:47:59] You know, I give them all credit, you know, to keep that going. And they the purpose of that call, like I said, was we had a gap we needed to fill. We needed we needed to reach the customers who were running the new products that were not in the same geographic location. So the only way to do that was virtually. And so, you know, we created a webinar series.

[00:48:27] And the idea was, like, let's be able to interact with those customers and let's be able to showcase our new products and our new features and and bring them and get their feedback and educate. Educate educate the ecosystem about all the stuff that was going on. And so if you're not already participating in that call, I wholeheartedly believe you should be like get out there. It's every Wednesday.

[00:48:54] And, you know, there's one even if you're not running if you're not running FSM or HCM products, you can go and there's ones for M3. There's one for CSI. There's one for LN. So. There's all of that. All of those series available to you, but definitely participate there and they're all recorded. And there's an entire library of every session that's ever been done. Right.

[00:49:22] So seven years of content that exists out in the knowledge base that you can go back and, hey, I want to learn about mobile supply chain management. Right. And, you know, hey, I've been put I've been hired in this role. I need to know what people keep telling me. I'm new. I'm the new MSCM guy here at this hospital. And people keep telling me that there's some new MSCM that was just released. It's the LPL version.

[00:49:52] And what does that mean? Like, what is that? Well, guess what? There's I'm sure there's two or three sessions on MSCM LPL that are out there. Right. That you can go out and re-listen to and quickly get up to speed about why it's different than the old. You know, where the product is, how it's evolved. You know what it's the value is of the new one, you know, so on and so forth. So you can at least get some background and better understand it. Speak intelligently about it. Right.

[00:50:21] So that's the power of that series. The gap that we're going to try and fill from an RPI perspective. We have great people here. We have great people who are in the trenches every day. The difference is that when we're when we were doing the sessions at Infor, the Innovation Insight sessions, they're largely being put on by product folks. Right. Product managers, product developers.

[00:50:47] So these are the folks who are designing it, building it, which is great. You know, they're going to tell you how it works, why we built it that way, you know, so on and so forth. And that's very important. And showcasing the product is is very important. But some of the best sessions that we that we did on Innovation Insights were around how do I use the product? Right. Yeah. How do I use it in the trenches like day to day? What are my problems?

[00:51:17] How do I use this to solve my problems? So I distinctly remember we did a series with the HCM team about reporting. Right. And it was broken out. It was done throughout the year. It was broken into like six segments. And we did this session and it was great.

[00:51:35] The PM Schneider, who was the the product manager, was joined by two two folks from development who answered a lot of the support. And services questions when they had questions. Right. Coming in from the field. And they these are the people who knew it backwards and forwards. Right. And they would. Hey, you know, like.

[00:52:03] I was out at a client's like, you know, I was trying to write this report and I ran into this issue. And and so. What what you know, what did I what do I have to do to get past that issue? How do I you know, maybe how do I fit that data into this report? How do I access it? Bubble. So real world scenarios. And they would walk you through how to do it.

[00:52:31] And then they would take questions from customers for the next session about, hey, you know, like, have you run into this problem or have you run into a similar problem? How can we help you? Like they got into actually solving real world problems. Right. So we have these experts here at RBI. 30 years in the field, you know, working at client sites and doing all this great stuff on the ground.

[00:52:56] You know, let's leverage them and let's do something similar where it's it's more about solving people's problems and getting into real world use cases of the software, not just showcasing the software and, you know, as a demo. Right. We want to we want to solve problems. Really, really love to hear that. I'm excited about that. And it also sounds like it's like the root. Like what you're talking about here with this this second iteration hanging with Hans, this new call is like that's the root of this whole conversation today.

[00:53:26] Solving problems, putting resources out there where people can just immediately know how to do something. Right. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And like so much of what I'm hearing is like it's a two way street. The relationship between the customer and the vendor and partners like us, like raise your hand, get involved. There's a lot of different entry ways to do that. And you just got to take that first step. And there's a lot of different resources out there that you can you can, you know, make that first step. Right.

[00:53:55] There is. And I think that's again, I'll go back to the comment that we made earlier. You know, the you are spending millions of dollars. You've invested millions of dollars in cold, hard cash. Number one. And in time, people's time, energy, like all of that. You've spent so much, you know, investment putting in this this system to run your business. Right. Right.

[00:54:24] How do I get the most out of that investment? So many customers. I, Chris, I mean, you've you. I know you're not in the field with the customers. Right. But you've talked to a lot of our guys. What's the number one question they ask? Right. I'm not getting enough value out of what I'm what I invested in. Right. Like what? Like, yeah. OK, I can, you know, I can go on and I can see my time off or I can, you know, like I'm paying. Well, I'm paying people. I'm paying my vendors. I'm doing this. But what what else can I do?

[00:54:54] Like and and I and I tell you that the frustration also exists at at Infor. Right. It exists that. Hey, guys. Hey, customer base. Like these are the dirty little conversations that happen behind, you know, like, hey, we we gave you all this stuff. We showcased all these features. And then you we run activity reports and things in the in the background. Right.

[00:55:20] And it says, OK, this new these new workspaces have only been turned on by 15 percent of the customers. Fifteen percent. Why did we spend all this time developing them? Like if only 15 percent, we're going to use them. Right. Or we spent all this time developing this new module and only, you know, 20 percent of HCM users are using it. Like you can imagine if you're the product manager or you're the developer about if you see that stuff. Like, why did I spend all my time building this?

[00:55:49] Why did I have to get it out the door? Like if it if nobody's going to use it. So. There's so many capabilities that are available that you have paid for, that you have that are available to you that just require you to go turn it on and become actively involved in the conversation. Right. And and and they can they can all help you, you know, with your business. Yes.

[00:56:16] You may or may not know this, but at the end of every episode, I ask my guests if they have one actionable takeaway for the audience, what it would be. I feel like I know what yours might be. But what what's your you know, the most important thing you want people to walk away with after listening to this conversation? What is it? Get involved. Get involved. Let's go. I love how clear that was. I mean, like I mean, great. I will tell you, like, look, I don't want to paint with this super broad brush to say none of our customers get involved.

[00:56:46] We have great customers that absolutely get involved. There are there are people that I know through come to know throughout the years. That are super active. They're they're super helpful. They provide great feedback. They raise their hand. They participate. Some of them don't even have time to raise their hand. Right. They they they're like, look, I can't we got too much going on in our organization. I can't participate in that program. But you know what?

[00:57:12] I'm still going to take a look at the documentation or take a look at the training and I'm going to still give you my feedback. Right. I can't maybe I can't be an early adopter, but I'm like we have great customers, but we have so many customers that are not maximizing that value. Right. Right. That and and yes, info holds some responsibility there. Absolutely. Right. Us as partners, you know, implementation partners, we hold some responsibility there.

[00:57:40] You know, making sure that our customers can can are maximizing the value. Right. Like when we're at an engagement, making sure that we sit down with our customers and say, hey, are you attending this? Are you being part of this? Have you have you checked out A, B and C? Like we could do we could all do a better job. All of us. Right. But the it's not a one way street. It's a two way street. It's a partnership. And these customers also should be raising their hands.

[00:58:10] If you're a customer out there. Right. And you have business problems that I know that you do. Right. All every customer has business problems they're looking to solve. Nobody's operating in this perfect environment. Right. That everything's flowing great and I don't need to do anything else to it. It's great. Works. Everything works. That that I'd love to meet you. Please reach out. But otherwise, you know, raise your hand, get involved. Raise your hand and get involved. And we're going to I love that. That's your takeaway.

[00:58:41] And with the new call, you know, gearing up in a couple of weeks here, that's going to be another opportunity for customers. Raise their hands and get involved. So we hope to see you on that show. Yeah. Yeah. I would love it. Bring your problems. You know, bring bring your questions. Bring your topics. Right. If, you know, you come to the first call and you're like, OK, that was cool. But, you know, like, hey, that doesn't really apply to me. But, hey, I can see the like, how about doing a call on this?

[00:59:09] You know, send them send them my way. Let's go. We'll get it set up. We got we have the people here and we'll make sure that we we can we can address your issues and and bring some value to the ecosystem. Bring your problems. We welcome them and would love to solve them in real time. So, Hans, thank you for your time this afternoon. This is a fantastic conversation. I feel like we could go for days. I love your enthusiasm for this topic.

[00:59:35] For those of you listening in, if you have any questions about today's segment or you want to learn more about hanging with Hans or other info resources out there, we would love to have a conversation with you. You can contact us at podcast at RPIC dot com. Again, that's podcast at RPIC dot com. This has been RPA Tech Connect. We will see you next time. Thanks, Hans. See you guys.