Embracing Industry 5.0 with Infor LN: The Future of Manufacturing

Apr 04, 2024

Infor | 6 min READ

Industry 5.0 will mitigate the gaps that remain after embracing Industry 4.0 technologies. Here’s how Infor LN can help manufacturing enterprises make this transition.

Joher Aurangabadwala

Global Practice Director

Infor

Birlasoft

The Industry 4.0 vision presented itself as a final evolution of industrial production. Digital technologies like cloud, AI, IoT, and wireless formed an essential aspect of this vision, and their adoption unleashed significant efficiencies across sectors globally.

However, when organizations attained Industry 4.0 maturity, they realized that this paradigm was fraught with unforeseeable gaps. In Industry 4.0, sustainability was an afterthought, and the human-machine relationship stood loosely defined. Moreover, new industry dynamics resulted from its adoption, and geopolitics has become unique this decade.

These factors indicate that the ultimate evolution of industrial production is yet to be realized. This, precisely, is the thinking that underpins the Industry 5.0 vision. While Industry 5.0 is a nascent framework, its relevance and upsides are being felt universally. At Birlasoft, our engagements with our clients have consistently revealed the centrality of ERP systems and processes in the Industry 5.0 vision.

In this article, learn how Industry 5.0 shapes a new vision for the digitally mature organization, and how Infor ERP can help you tap into this symbiosis between humans and machines to drive resilience, profitability, and customer outcomes.

What happened between Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0?

The Industry 4.0 momentum ushered in a rapid adoption of digital technologies. At the core of this phenomenon was the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, which drove various processes and decisions from engineering and R&D to the shopfloor and the last mile.

ERP deployments have evolved over this period. Legacy ERP deployments continued to amass more and more customizations over time, and decade-long upgrade cycles began to hold businesses back from reaping the promised benefits of Industry 4.0 adoption.

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At the same time, sustainability imperatives, cost pressures, and rising customer expectations have sent manufacturers hunting for new levers for profitability, innovation, and sustainability actions across the product life cycle. Moreover, new delivery models like assemble-to-order and project-based manufacturing find poor support in legacy ERP systems.

In conjunction with these factors, clunky digital processes in legacy ERPs degrade the employee experience. The deployment of IoT sensors and robotics has brought an array of technologies into manufacturing organizations, but they continue to work alongside people in a discordant fashion. Moreover, adverse geopolitical factors and cost pressures have exposed new weak links in the enterprise, leaving old tactics for building resilience questionable at best.

Industry 5.0: Key Tenets

These gaps have led associations to formulate Industry 5.0, a new paradigm of manufacturing that addresses new challenges with a fresh perspective. The Industry 5.0 paradigm is based on these four tenets:

Human centricity: Technology adoption is not driven solely by the top line/bottom line. Instead, technology is chosen and deployed in a human-centric fashion, aiming for better collaboration and synergistic machine-human interaction.
Resilience: Old levers for building resilience (like automation and connected factories) are replaced by tactical tools like supply chain visibility, hybrid work, and multisite planning.
Sustainability: In Industry 5.0, sustainability is at the heart of operations orchestration. As a result, sustainability strategies are targeted at each step of the product life cycle.
Customer Value: An extension of the human-centric enterprise is the search for customer value. This manifests as elevated CX across the product life cycle, from order to repair.

With these core principles, Industry 5.0 unlocks new profitability levers, greater predictability, and better outcomes for all stakeholders, from shareholders and employees to customers and society.

How Infor LN can help your organization mature to Industry 5.0

Since ERP systems touch a spectrum of enterprise processes, they are the most strategically valuable systems for advancing Industry 5.0 maturity. Infor’s suite of ERP products is a significant mention here, as it overcomes the critical shortcomings of heavyweight ERP solutions while offering capabilities that are pivoted on Industry 5.0 tenets.

Moreover, Infor can coexist with other ERP solutions in two-tier strategies, instantly activating the benefits of industry-specific capabilities with a templated delivery model that brings predictable results with repeatable success.

Here are four ways in which Infor ERP products can help you advance Industry 5.0 maturity at your organization:

#1. Building a human-centric organization

Infor ERP offers a consumer-grade UX to ground-level employees like demand planners, plant managers, engineers, sales, and customer service teams. This instantly elevates the user experience across key business processes, creating a human-centric digital enterprise. Moreover, it enables users to access ERP processes using their smartphones, which makes hybrid work frictionless and faster.

Infor’s Enterprise Automation suite is replete with integration and workflow design capabilities, which enables organizations to embed AI and automation in a user-friendly way. Based on social design principles, Infor ERP makes collaboration natural and borderless, which breaks the silos and drives holistic outcomes by empowering a bionic organization.

#2. Improving organizational resilience

Infor ERP suite represents a cluster of tools that can unify disparate functions to build a transparent and data-driven organization. For instance, it can create4 greater upstream reliability with supplier portals and provisions for end-to-end sub-contractor management. Similarly, Infor PLM can power closed-loop manufacturing with digital threads that shrink the gap between product design, manufacturing, and service operations.

Likewise, cost peg transfer and multisite structure elements can help organizations paint an exhaustive picture of their finances that decision-makers can trust. This trust is essential for building reliable and fail-proof processes across functions, ultimately contributing to improved organizational resilience.

#3. Advancing sustainability outcomes

A product lifecycle approach is crucial to embed sustainability into the core operating model. While this is challenging to achieve with legacy ERP solutions, Infor makes this possible with a PLM solution that integrates seamlessly with downstream systems.

This eliminates the gap between the design teams, the engineers, the shop floor, and the service teams. With this comprehensive picture, engineers can observe the sustainability impact of their design decisions, or how a change in the production process could preempt a more significant Greenhouse Gas (GHG) footprint.

Similarly, connected field services can power optimum maintenance intervals to control the emissions of running products. These levers can help organizations achieve sustainability wins across the product life cycle.

#4. Creating customer value

Finally, Infor can help businesses exploit hidden and inaccessible sources of value creation. For instance, it can be used to build intuitive front ends for ordering custom products, which integrate with downstream manufacturing processes. Likewise, it can power as-a-service models that reliably facilitate renting, billing, and service of items in deployment.

Moreover, closed-loop manufacturing can shorten the time-to-market, and standardization can plug quality gaps to improve customer satisfaction. Lastly, Infor ERP runs on AWS, promising the lowest lifetime cost of ownership. This enables businesses to realize new cost savings and deliver to customers more competitively.

Next Steps

The shortcomings of Industry 4.0 became apparent with the constraints imposed by the pandemic four years ago. The subsequent economic and geopolitical conditions and new market dynamics further widened the gaps in this paradigm.

Industry 5.0 envisions a new order of industrial production based on human-machine synergy, sustainability, improved customer value, and resilience. All of these core tenets will also result in greater profitability and competitiveness. However, industry-specificity will be essential to this vision, and ERP systems will be the starting point of this transition.

Infor’s composable ERP ecosystem can now help businesses translate this vision into action and help them thrive in the rugged and demanding business landscape of the present and the future.

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