Infor, the industry cloud company, announced that LNS a manufacturer of a wide range of products designed to optimize the performance, productivity and profitability of manufacturers operating in the machine-tool sector -- has opted to deploy Infor M3 CloudSuite. Designed for manufacturers and distributors of products and after-sales services, this enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers the flexibility required to manage mixed and complex value chains. This project is part of a wider digital transformation of the company and aims to achieve greater standardization at a global level to improve the quality of work, optimize access to information and improve collaboration between users. "We have been an Infor customer for more than 15 years and initiated our first project in 2005 on a limited scope, which at the time concerned only Switzerland," explains Stéphane Englert, CIO of LNS. "Since then, we have continued to evolve our system with the deployment of our ERP across various sites and the completion, in 2019, of a first stage of migration to a single-tenant cloud environment. Today, as we prepare to switch to the multi-tenant cloud, our objective is to rewrite our processes entirely to simplify, standardize and industrialize them, and thus promote collaboration and exchange between our employees worldwide."

This week, Infor is the latest to have announced the general availability of its digital assistant within Microsoft Teams. The integration will enable customers to access information from within their ERP systems. To do so, customers will interact with the Infor Coleman AI Digital Assistant app for Teams. The digital assistant bot was previously available via a web browser, the Infor Go mobile app, and Amazon Alexa for Business. Oddly, unlike many others, Infor has not yet added an integration.

AI Daily Roundup starts today! We are covering the top updates from around the world. The updates will feature state-of-the-art capabilities in artificial intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation, Fintech and human-system interactions. We will cover the role of AI Daily Roundup and their application in various industries and daily lives. In Bangalore, India, 10th grader Rahul Jaikrishna developed Cyber Detective – an artificial intelligence-based model that detects cyber bullying with an accuracy of up to 80%.

In keeping with our mission to provide comprehensive advertising analysis, MediaRadar puts together a report of the most important mergers and acquisitions news each week. Stay in the loop, whether you sell advertising space or focus on business development. This week, Gilead takes out FortySeven, Apple acquires start-up Voysis and Infor is purchased by Koch Industries. The American biotechnology company, Gilead has completed an acquisition of Forty Seven, Inc. at a rate of $97.50 per share that equates to a lump sum of $4.9 billion in cash. The deal bolsters Gilead's portfolio of oncology drugs through Forty Seven Inc.'s blood cancer medicine, which is expected to be on the market within 2 years.

Bottom line: Enterprises are attaining double-digit improvements in forecast error rates, demand planning productivity, cost reductions and on-time shipments using machine learning today, revolutionising supply chain management in the process. Machine learning algorithms and the models they're based on excel at finding anomalies, patterns and predictive insights in large data sets. Many supply chain challenges are time, cost and resource constraint-based, making machine learning an ideal technology to solve them. From Amazon's Kiva robotics relying on machine learning to improve accuracy, speed and scale to DHL relying on AI and machine learning to power their Predictive Network Management system that analyses 58 different parameters of internal data to identify the top factors influencing shipment delays, machine learning is defining the next generation of supply chain management. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 95% of Supply Chain Planning (SCP) vendors will be relying on supervised and unsupervised machine learning in their solutions.

Infor has signed a new research partnership with the University of Oxford and extended its partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, both to study machine learning. Infor awarded an unrestricted research gift of $100,000 USD to support on-going work on in-database machine learning to the Factorised Databases (FDB) Project of the Computer Science Department at Oxford in the UK. Professor Dan Olteanu leads the FDB Project. "Our goal is to build a scalable system for training machine learning models over relational databases. Our approach comes with both theoretical and practical benefits. It enjoys lower computational complexity than the existing approaches, which means, in practice, training over larger datasets and orders-of-magnitude faster than state-of-the-art analytics systems."

Infor Coleman is a powerful artificial intelligence platform designed specifically for business users – built upon a foundation of industry-specific data. At any given moment, it can help with executing tasks, recommending next-best sales offers, and even predicting maintenance issues and adjusting production schedules accordingly. The platform is named after the inspiring physicist and mathematician Katherine Coleman Johnson, whose trail-blazing work helped U.S. astronauts land on the moon, Coleman represents a giant leap for artificial intelligence at scale.

When reviewing 2018's retail landscape, there have certainly been ongoing challenges and opportunities that have pushed the evolution of retail to match the demands of a changing consumer. Mobile technology, speed of service/delivery, and low prices are just the tip of the iceberg. In recent discussions with a variety of retailers and retail analysts in Australia and New Zealand, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are high on everyone's list of toys for the New Year to generate efficiencies across the retail enterprise. The question retailers are asking is whether to build an AI/ML engine themselves or, more probable, turn to a specialised software company already operating in the AI/ML space. Consumers want their product and they want it now -- in their size, flavour, length, shape, brand, weight.

At Infor's Inforum conference in Washington, DC, Infor launched its Coleman Digital Assistant. It is the first of the Coleman AI family products that the company is planning. Enterprise Times sat down with Massimo Capoccia, SVP Infor OS, Technology, Infor to talk about Coleman and other technologies that Infor is planning to bring to market. Unlike many of its competitors, Infor has developed Coleman completely in-house. This is a brave move. AI is a technology that is developing rapidly and has a high cost to get into.

In the IT business, innovation is king. If you fail to keep up, you run the risk of falling behind and becoming stale. There's where ERP as a product category found itself thanks to the advent of cloud computing, and now we're on the cusp of finding out if the ERP market can deliver on the next set of emerging capabilities -- machine learning, artificial intelligence, and IoT – which industry watchers have termed Industry 4.0. We're at an interesting inflection point in enterprise software at the moment, in particular how well-established players react to rapid technological innovation. In the last decade, we've seen how cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) delivery methods rendered old ERP business models nearly obsolete, as companies sought innovation in business processes and simplified deployments.