Cloud-based Artificial Intelligence promises supply chain benefits

Advancing the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the supply chain discipline, Infor – a builder of cloud-based business software for various industries – has announced an enterprise-grade, industry-specific AI platform called Coleman for its Infor CloudSuite applications.

Coleman operates below an application’s surface, mining data and using powerful machine learning to improve processes such as inventory management, transportation routing and predictive maintenance. It also provides AI-driven recommendations and advice to enable users to make better business decisions more quickly. In addition, Coleman acts as a smart AI partner, augmenting the user’s work.

Coleman uses natural language processing and image recognition to chat, hear, talk and recognize images to help people use technology more efficiently. Coleman develops a conversational relationship with the user which can be rendered in Infor Ming.le, a social collaboration platform, or a synthetic conversational user interface. In view of the fact that humans are able to speak and hear three to four times as many words per minute as they can type, this increases user efficiency. Coleman also significantly boosts productivity by processing the vast amount of mission-critical business data from Infor CloudSuite, automating search and gather functions which can currently take up 20 percent of user’s work week.

Some of the elements of Coleman already available today include predictive inventory management for healthcare, price optimization management for hospitality, and forecasting, assortment planning and promotion management for retail. Infor is expected to introduce Coleman to Infor CloudSuite industry suites over the next year.

The name ‘Coleman’ was chosen in honour of Katherine Coleman Johnson. Ms Johnson’s passion for and excellence in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) from a young age led her to become an essential figure in the United States’ space programme, and her critical calculations actually helped man reach the moon. Ms Johnson’s story was depicted in the 2016 film Hidden Figures.

www.infor.com