Infor continues to build out its ability to help companies interact more effectively with both their suppliers and their customers.

The company, mostly known as a provider of enterprise resource planning software for manufacturers, distributors and retailers across various industries, took another step this week to provide its clients with tools to more effectively get the right products in front of the right customers at the right time.

Infor is investing $25 million in Predictix, a company that specializes in cloud-based software that helps companies forecast and prepare for customer demand, Infor announced at the National Retail Federation’s annual convention and trade show in New York earlier this week. Predictix software is designed to provide granular information on consumer demand for individual products as well as clusters of products, and across local as well as broad geographical areas. It’s also designed to show how well products will sell throughout a selling season at particular price levels, helping retailers decide if and when to mark down product prices, and by how much.

This helps retailer clients like Whole Foods Market and The Home Depot better plan merchandise assortments and price levels for individual stores and geographical areas, as well as across entire retail chains and markets, says Corey Tollefson, Infor’s senior vice president and general manager.

Infor is integrating Predictix software with its own CloudSuite Retail set of retail operation software, a move that will upgrade the CloudSuite Retailer with modules for such operations as demand forecasting and planning merchandise assortments. “We’ve seen first-hand the powerful insights from Predictix at Whole Foods Market,” says Jason Beuchel, the grocery’s chain’s executive vice president and chief information officer. “It is the perfect complement to our efforts with Infor to build a new, modern retail software suite that will propel us into a new era.” 

The integrated software is also capable of letting retailers share demand forecasting data with their suppliers to help better plan the production and flow of inventory, an option being used by Home Depot, Tollefson says. He adds that he expects more retailers to also begin sharing demand data with suppliers as more of them take advantage of the newly integrated Predictix and CoudSuite Retail software.

Although Infor is integrating Predictix for now only with its software for retailers, it will also look at linking it with the business operations software it provides other industries such as health care and aerospace manufacturing.

Infor declines to specify the cost of deploying its software, but Tollefson says it generally uses a “shared success” model, under which clients pay Infor a percentage of year-over-year growth after deploying its software. Infor hosts its software in a cloud-based server network provided by Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc.

Infor, which has an option to buy out all of Predictix, has been on a track of building out its technology to operate beyond the internal workings of its clients’ businesses. Last year, Infor paid $675 million to acquire GT Nexus, an Internet-based procurement network used by such global companies as Caterpillar, Procter & Gamble and Levi Strauss & Co. to order manufactured products they sell to customers.

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