Seven Companies Recognized For Innovative Business Initiatives

Infor today announced the winners of its first annual Enterprising Excellence Award, established to recognize customers who are using Infor solutions to become more effective competitors, expand into new markets, or enhance their operational agility. The winners were highlighted at Inforum 2007, Infor’s global annual user conference, this week in Las Vegas. This year’s theme, “Enterprising U,” celebrates the enterprising qualities of Infor’s more than 70,000 customers, how they benefit from the Infor difference, and highlights the networking and learning opportunities of the four-day event.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
The seven winners were chosen from more than 60 nominations submitted from Infor employees, channel partners, and customers. Awards were distributed in categories such as, operational excellence, financial excellence, customer excellence, innovation, and enterprising customer of the year.

“These seven companies represent what it means to be enterprising: creative, agile, resourceful, focused and different,” said Rick Parker, SVP of global marketing for Infor. “They are the vanguard of the strategic application of technology. Infor congratulates all of our winners and nominees for their enterprising approach to market and competitive challenges.”

Operational Excellence Award Winners:
• AccuSpec, recognized for the implementation of an aggressive program to enhance its competitive position. Focused on quality improvements, these initiatives included the automation of many business processes, which led to improved on-time delivery, enhanced overall quality, and reduced customer returns. Through their use of the electronics manufacturing-specific capabilities of Infor ERP SyteLine, implemented in only 10 weeks, AccuSpec improved on-time delivery to 90 percent, reduced customer returns by 85 percent, and saw an overall Return on Investment (ROI) of 400 percent.

• Bentley College, selected for its deployment of Infor EAM Enterprise Edition (formerly Datastream 7i) to enhance its facilities management operations, a critical component of the college’s transformation into an internationally recognized business university. As part of this program, Bentley College created new business processes to save labor costs, including Web-based work requests, automated cost reporting and dorm inspections, preventative maintenance, and more. Bentley College saw a 200 percent ROI from these new processes in their first year and reduced the time to complete work orders by 24 percent.

• Silex Innovations, chosen for their implementation of Infor ERP VISUAL to support its international expansion and to establish new efficiencies in manufacturing. Implemented by Infor Channel Partner Shop9000, VISUAL helped Silex improve by eight the number of days outstanding on receivables, reduced on-hand inventory levels by 25 percent, improved on-time delivery performance to 90 percent, doubled quotation opportunities, and enhanced customer service - all capped by a payback of less than six months.

Financial Excellence Award Winner
• Jabil, recognized for its internal initiative to migrate many disparate forecasting and customer income statement reports across its 56 global locations into a Web-based reporting system. Jabil’s management required increased visibility into customer data and access to reports in a timely manner to enable more strategic and effective decision making. Through Jabil’s implementation of Infor PM (performance management) solutions, the company gained a comprehensive Web-based tool to make operational decisions within accelerated timeframes.

Customer Excellence Award Winner
• HSBC Mexico, recognized for its use of Infor CRM Epiphany to realize its vision of becoming the best bank for customers. Through Infor CRM Epiphany, HSBC Mexico implemented inbound and outbound marketing, synchronizing their channels to achieve significant results in credit cards, personal loans, auto loans, and investments. The company has also been awarded two Gartner CRM Excellence Awards and three CRM Awards from Peppers & Rogers Group for their CRM initiative.

Innovation Excellence Award Winner
• DHL, the logistics brand of Deutsche Post World Net, recognized for their Innovation Center. Recently opened (March 2007) near Cologne, Germany, this showpiece facility highlights how DHL is helping customers meet their shipping and logistics challenges. Through exhibits, kiosks, interactive games, multimedia, and other demonstrations, DHL, along with companies such as Infor and their SCM Network Design solution, has created a logistics showpiece, highlighting the technologies of today and tomorrow.

Enterprising Customer of the Year
• Menlo Worldwide, recognized for its pioneering work in the development of an end-to-end supply chain and logistics management solution. Menlo Worldwide, a third party logistics provider, needed a system that enabled low-cost and flexible integration with many trading partners and allowed them to evolve away from a high-touch, high transaction environment to one requiring no human processing. Through Infor ERP LN Studio, Infor ERP Baan 5, Infor Warehouse Management Provia, and other applications, Menlo Worldwide has reduced order throughput from an average of 15-20 minutes to 3-5 minutes, while increasing customer transaction volume to nine times previous levels.

About Infor
Infor delivers business-specific software to enterprising organizations.  With experience built in, Infor's solutions enable businesses of all sizes to be more enterprising and adapt to the rapid changes of a global marketplace. With more than 70,000 customers, Infor is changing what businesses expect from an enterprise software provider. For additional information, visit: www.infor.com.

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