Infor’s Jim Schaper Focuses on
Choice and ROI

By Michael Roney

Infor Chairman and CEO Jim Schaper feels the pain of businesses dealing with today’s tough economy, and has dedicated his $2 billion business software company to doing something about it. His solution: offer customers more choices that make it easier and less costly for them to adopt the most advanced software innovations—attributes that he believes are essential to generating return on investment (ROI) and growth.

Infor has 8,000 employees and over 70,000 worldwide customers. Of those customers, 85% operate in the $50 million to $1 billion mid-market. In Shaper’s view, experience and focus on serving the true needs of the mid-market give Infor the advantage, especially when it’s competing with the likes of SAP and Oracle.

“Overall, big ERP has lost the trust of its customers,” he says, citing its regular maintenance increases and excessively time-consuming, highly complex infrastructure implementations. “Customers just want their world simplified. They’re looking for elegant, easy-to-use solutions that are cost-effective to acquire, implement and manage on a long-term basis—solutions that will get the job done simply and on their terms. Progress shouldn’t be hard to attain—it should be frictionless.”

Making Software Easier
Schaper sees Infor’s software approach as critical to offering his customers an alternative to the costs and hassles of big ERP. “We’re constantly improving that intersect point between technical innovation and the business value that drives it to our customers’ benefit,” he notes. For example:

1. Technical value: Infor’s open service-oriented architecture (SOA) receives continual enhancements that keep solutions cutting-edge competitive, while unique implementation tools allow new systems to go live at lower cost quickly, generating ROI much earlier.


2. Business value: Infor’s ground-breaking FLEX program allows customers to upgrade and in some cases exchange their Infor software at little or no cost, and to do so on their schedule. “We’re never going to tell you that we’re going to stop support or give you 12 months to get off of our software,” Schaper states.


3. Value for maintenance: “We believe that we have to continually add value to our maintenance agreements, not just jack up the prices,” Schaper says. “That is profoundly different than many of the others in the industry.”

“We want to give customers the ability to add what they need,
when they need it, with best-in-class functionality and no disruption.”

Choice Equals ROI

Ultimately, Schaper would like Infor to be seen as a real agent of change in an industry that to him is in many ways archaic. “More choice equals more flexibility in how customers acquire our software, how they deploy it, how they pay for it, and ultimately, how they leverage it internally to the betterment of their business in both bad and good economic times,” he says.

He adds that Infor made a decision a long time ago that it’s better to offer multiple products that address specific market and industry requirements than to build one monolithic application and then have customers spend an inordinate amount of money customizing the product around their requirements. “We want to give customers the ability to add what they need, when they need it, with best-in-class functionality and no disruption,” he says. “It’s their choice. We succeed when they succeed.”