CERN Earns Top Honor, Named 2014 Customer of the Year for Infor Excellence in Action Awards
New Delhi, India, January 02, 2015: Infor, a leading provider of business application software serving more than 73,000 customers, today announced that CERN has been named Customer of the Year for the 2014 Infor Excellence in Action Awards. These awards recognize organizations that have successfully utilized Infor technology to drive business value, and are announced annually at Infor’s user conference, Inforum. As the world’s largest research organization for particle physics, CERN relies on Infor Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Infor LN to operate and maintain its Large Hadron Collider (LHC). CERN has been an Infor customer for 25 years, and was previously awarded Operational Excellence honors in the 2013 Infor Excellence in Action Awards.
“As a publically funded international non-profit organization, it is of optimal importance for us to adhere to a strict level of operational efficiency. We are helped in this task by the Infor asset-management solutions,” said David Widegren, head of engineering processes support, CERN. “Earning this award is an honor for us and we are looking forward to continuing our asset-management journey with Infor”.
In addition to the LHC, CERN operates more than 700 surface building and work facilities for approximately 12,000 scientists, with Infor EAM storing data for 1.5 million pieces of equipment. The scale and range necessary to support CERN’s operating activities requires that a significant amount of the maintenance work is outsourced. Infor EAM is able to manage and coordinate many of these third-party activities through kiosks, mobile applications and intuitive interfaces to ensure information is properly captured and analyzed. By providing field technicians with mobile tools to enter information in real-time while away from the office, CERN has made 15 percent more manpower available for other value-added tasks. Since implementation, Infor has facilitated significant improvements in speed and operational efficiency and substantially reduced overall operational costs.
Infor accounts for roughly 750 different users who register more than 72,000 asset movements through self-service kiosks. This has resulted in increased accuracy for the organization when dealing in asset traceability across various locations. By facilitating access to asset data and providing a means for updating via multiple tailored interfaces, CERN has seen a 160 percent increase in usage and frequency of information updates in the system over the past six months. As a result, CERN has achieved a more accurate level of information and higher data quality, which also creates more trust and appeal for the system. The improved tools enabling quicker and more detailed traceability of assets from Infor EAM have been paramount to the organization’s overall effort to comply with the national legislation in both Switzerland and France.
“It is with great pleasure that we honor CERN with the Customer of the Year award for their innovative use asset management technology, one which requires a robust and flexible platform to meet the needs of their expansive institution,” said Stephan Scholl, president of Infor. “CERN is an excellent example for organizations that are seeking a technology platform to help reduce operational costs while improving overall efficiency.”