Infor announce a strategic partnership with Predictix

Infor has announced a strategic partnership with Predictix, the provider of Cloud, predictive, and machine-learning solutions for retailers. Infor will become a reseller of Predictix, deploying, managing, and supporting the applications for customers in the Infor Cloud, and will infuse Predictix into development of Infor CloudSuite Retail, a new cloud application designed for today’s retailing landscape announced in October 2015 in collaboration with Whole Foods Market, a mutual Infor/Predictix customer.

Predictix is designed for people across the retail operation to configure and build models. It supports multiple formats and types of retailing on a global scale, including online, brick-and-mortar, social, mobile, fashion, hardlines, mass-merchant, and grocery. Predictix will enable Infor to enhance CloudSuite Retail with modules that support:

• Demand Forecasting – Predictix’s self-learning algorithms recognise patterns from unlimited amounts of data, becoming more accurate as data builds over time. Increasingly accurate Demand Forecasting facilitates more informed decisions in the execution systems, leading to higher sales and greater profitability.
• Merchandise Financial Planning – Infor customers will be able to leverage Predictix’s self-service configuration tools which allow retailers and their users to configure the solution and ensure that they can customise processes that are unique to the company.
• Assortment Planning / Category Management – Built specifically for the needs of fashion, grocery and specialty retailers to reflect the unique attributes and processes for each type of business, benefitting retailers with advanced analytics for localising and optimising company, cluster, market, and/or store-specific assortments.
• Network Flow Optimisation – Models a retailer’s entire supply chain network and all of the various flows in and out of it, considering billions of variables, depending on the size of the retailer, by leveraging the elastic cloud and predictive platform. The application then optimises and determines how much to flow and when to flow between nodes and selects the most optimal modes of transportation to maximise profit.
• Allocation & Markdown Optimisation – Solves both allocation and markdown processes simultaneously to provide up to 20 percent greater revenues and profit. This proprietary technology leverages mathematical optimisation to solve these problems holistically, yielding substantial retailer benefits.

Infor have also stated that Predictix and CloudSuite Retail will also be integrated with GT Nexus, the company they bought last year. This integration will provide visibility into a retailer’s extended supply chain to manage production, and monitor goods in transit and at rest. The system will function as a virtual global control tower for the retailer, providing responses to disruptions in the supply chain and recommending responses to minimise stock-outs and other negative consequences of irregularities.