If your company runs on Infor, you probably know the pattern. Sales, inventory and finance data all sit in the ERP, yet most reports still go through finance or IT. Anyone who wants a quick answer ends up exporting to a spreadsheet, and multi-entity reporting gets stitched together by hand. Choosing the right business intelligence for Infor should fix that. The trouble is that the options range from native modules to general-purpose analytics tools to industry-built platforms, and each comes with different costs, integration demands and learning curves.
The Ultimate Business Intelligence Guide for Infor Users, published by Phocas, is written for manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers in exactly that position. If you have outgrown native reporting and need to pick a BI platform without spending a year or a budget on the wrong one, it gives you a structured way to make that call.
Why Infor ERP reporting and spreadsheets stop scaling
The guide starts with the approaches most Infor users already rely on: built-in Infor ERP reporting, Excel workarounds and custom builds on tools like Power BI. It explains where each one tends to break down. You'll see why reports slow to a crawl on large datasets, how customizing the ERP across business units creates data silos, and why an in-house build that looks cheap at the start often carries heavy development and maintenance costs later.
You'll also find a set of warning signs that a business is ready for a dedicated BI tool, along with a breakdown of what good analytics looks like in each sector. Wholesalers, retailers and manufacturers each get their own section, covering the analysis that matters most to them, from inventory and distribution to store performance and production quality.
Comparing business intelligence for Infor: Power BI, Tableau and Infor Birst alternatives
The middle of the guide is a vendor-by-vendor review of six BI platforms that Infor customers commonly consider. For each one, it looks at how the tool connects to Infor, where performance and usability problems tend to appear, and how the pricing model can push total cost of ownership higher than the sticker price suggests. If you've been weighing Power BI vs Tableau, or looking for Infor Birst alternatives, this section lays out the trade-offs in plain terms.
Those reviews sit alongside user ratings from the independent BARC BI Survey, so you can see how customers score each product on satisfaction, business value, vendor support and willingness to recommend. The scores themselves are in the PDF.
AI-powered analytics gets its own treatment, with practical questions for telling useful features apart from black-box answers you can't verify. There's also a clear explanation of what Infor Marketplace approval involves and why it can lower integration risk when you're comparing Infor BI software.
How to evaluate BI vendors and make a low-risk choice
Once you have a shortlist, the focus moves to evaluation. The guide sets out the criteria worth testing before you buy, including:
- Total cost of ownership, including integration, data warehousing, training and support
- Whether the platform can handle multi-entity, high-volume data and complex reporting
- Self-service usability for non-technical staff, with data security configured per user
- Implementation timelines and the quality of ongoing training and support
Further sections cover data security (encryption, access controls and compliance), what drives user adoption after go-live, and the signals of a dependable vendor, such as transparent pricing and a credible product roadmap. Because Phocas produced the guide, it also shows how the Phocas platform connects to Infor and other data sources and what a typical implementation timeline looks like.
Many readers will want to print the final page. It's a BI vendor checklist of 20 questions to put to every supplier, covering integration, security, pricing, support and AI transparency, so each conversation with a vendor runs on the same terms.
Download the full guide to get the six-platform comparison, the BARC user ratings, sector-specific analytics advice and the complete vendor checklist. You'll have what you need to build a defensible shortlist and a business case your finance team can sign off on.