Crown Agents Invests in New Infor Financial Management System

FARNBOROUGH - February 07, 2013 - Infor, a leading provider of business application software serving more than 70,000 customers, today announced that Crown Agents, an international development specialist, is implementing a new Infor SunSystems financial management system.

The £600,000 system, is scheduled to go live in Q2 2013 and includes Infor's next generation lightweight middleware platform Infor10 ION, to provide Crown Agents with unified financial management. Crown Agents expects this to help bring better management information to the firm, improve accounting processes and support the company as it grows. News Points • Crown Agents is an international development specialist working with leaders across the world to make profound changes to systems, organisations and society. It works with governments, companies and NGOs across four continents in more than 100 countries.

The new core financial management system will be accessed by staff members across Crown Agents' 33 offices around the globe including the UK, the US and Japan.

• Recognising that they required a new system to provide more detailed visibility of management information and drive more efficient accounting processes, Crown Agents embarked on a full procurement exercise before selecting Infor SunSystems. Infor SunSystems was chosen because of its unrivalled capabilities in the recording and reporting of financial information associated to every aspect of Crown's business, its flexible and intuitive deployment options and the strong integration capability provided through Infor's ION technology.

• While Infor will be predominantly used by the Crown Agents finance team, the solution will be accessed by in excess of 1200 non-financial staff around the organisation, for the purposes of timesheet and expense collation, invoice generation and project reporting purposes.

• As well as Infor SunSystems and ION, the implementation at Crown Agents includes Infor Enterprise Performance Management for enhanced reporting , Infor Enterprise Performance Accelerator Kit (EPAK), a training application to enrich and extend the Infor applications so they are fully optimised by users, and Infor SunSystems Professional Services Automation and Infor Expense Management to improve time and expense processes.

• Thanks to Infor, Crown Agents expects that its accounting processes will become more efficient and that it will be able to generate management information in many different ways in a more timely manner than it is currently capable of doing.

Crown Agents Quote "Technology developments have progressed immensely in recent years. Had we attempted an upgrade such as this five years ago, it would have been a more costly process with far inferior products," says Ken Coveney, chief financial officer, Crown Agents.

"Crown Agents regularly launches new products and expands into new geographies. Thanks to Infor's agility, adaptability and the integration capabilities of ION, we can easily recreate new data structures to support this business expansion in a timely manner.

"Bearing in mind the scale of the implementation at Crown Agents, it is important that we use a forward-thinking supplier who will remain at the forefront of the industry and not leave us stranded with an out-dated system in the future. Also, having carefully analysed the market, we were impressed with Infor's knowledge and technical experience, as well as the UK support which is unlike any other player in the market."

Infor Quote "For an organisation such as Crown Agents, which operates from multiple sites around the world, it can be hard for managers to have a complete and accurate picture of business performance," says Jon Casey, UK Sales VP, Financial Management Solutions, Infor.

"Equally, business expansion can be challenging from a technical perspective as new territories need to quickly come up to speed with the existing systems. Infor's solutions have been designed to grow in tandem with an organisation as it evolves, in whatever shape or form this may be.

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Infor SunSystems  Infor ION  Infor Enterprise Performance Management  Infor Expense Management  Infor Enterprise Performance Accelerator kit About Crown Agents Crown Agents is an international development specialist, working with leaders across the world to make profound changes to systems, organisations and society. It works with governments, companies and NGOs across four continents in more than 100 countries. It has offices in more than 33 countries and speaks more than 50 languages.

Crown Agents' expertise in public finance, banking, investment, institutional development, supply chain and training enables governments to increase prosperity, reduce poverty and improve health. About Infor Infor is the third-largest provider of enterprise applications and services, helping 70,000 customers in 194 countries improve operations, drive growth, and quickly adapt to changes in business demands. Infor offers deep industry-specific applications and suites, engineered for speed, using ground-breaking technology that delivers a rich user experience, and flexible deployment options that give customers a choice to run their businesses in the cloud, on-premises, or both.