Watlow Taps Infor to Revolutionize Customer Experience Throughout the Product Lifecycle

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - January 17, 2017) - Infor, a leading provider of beautiful business applications specialized by industry and built for the cloud, today announced that Watlow, an industry leader in the design and manufacture of complete thermal systems, has selected Infor Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Accelerate to enhance their customer's experience by improving global business processes. As a manufacturer of state-of-the-art industrial heaters, temperature sensors and thermal control applications, Watlow partners with its customers to help them optimize their thermal performance to deliver efficient heating products and applications. To better achieve this goal, Watlow has selected Infor and Ultra Consulting to help undertake the Horizon Project, which is focused on transforming the Watlow experience for customers and team members while delivering improved business processes and supporting systems. By choosing to implement Infor PLM Accelerate, Watlow plans to improve data integrity, standardize business processes and supporting systems across the enterprise, increase information availability and deliver enterprise-wide collaboration that fortifies decision-based business processes.

At the core, Watlow is a manufacturer of all of the components required to deliver fully optimized thermal systems that are then custom designed to meet the specific business needs of each customer. Watlow heaters, sensors and controllers are purchased by OEM manufacturers, which then utilize these components to build their own products. In an effort to increase the amount of systems level work and transition from commodity-heavy orders, Ultra, a consulting group specialized in manufacturing, was brought in to help shape this vision through a strategic technology investment that better targets the engineering community as a customer base. Watlow also selected Infor PLM Accelerate, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that is designed to holistically manage product development at every stage of the lifecycle.

"We strive to provide every customer with the best products and applications needed to fulfill their thermal requirements, many of which are customized," said Steve Desloge, chief financial officer, Watlow. "This requires us to constantly evaluate our approach to ensure we can deliver the highest quality for the best value. By selecting Infor, we are able to take proactive steps to achieve a lean business model that reinforces the scale of product development available to our customers, while using a more collaborative approach to do so. This investment will also support our vision by enabling more effective processes to support systems-based sales."