In most large businesses, there comes a time when the difference between the staffing plan and actual operations is painfully clear. For example, a hospital floor that is short-staffed on a Tuesday morning or a distribution center that is scrambling to cover a shift on a holiday weekend. That’s when workforce management software either pays for itself or is quietly written off as just another cost in the IT budget. People often call it “Infor WFM,” which stands for “Infor Workforce Management.” Infor WFM has been marketing itself as the answer to that problem for large businesses.
That said, Infor is not a new company. It was started in 2002 and has its headquarters in Atlanta. It has grown into a business cloud software provider that works with more than 60,000 organizations in 175 countries. It specializes in healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and the public sector. The company’s workforce management solution is part of its larger human capital management (HCM) portfolio. It was designed to meet the needs of frontline, hourly, and remote workers. That’s not the same problem as running an office with 200 people. It’s because of shift workers, union contracts, labor laws, and the constant pressure of changing demand.
It’s not just one feature that makes Infor WFM stand out. Instead of putting together different tools that don’t really talk to each other, this platform tries to handle scheduling, time and attendance, labor forecasting, and compliance all in one place. Machine learning is used by the scheduling engine to make rules-based schedules that take into account employee skills, shift preferences, union requirements, and business demand all at the same time. That’s not a small thing for a hospital or a big store. Trying to balance all of those factors by hand for hundreds of employees is the kind of administrative work that takes managers a lot of time and still leads to mistakes.
Pay attention to the compliance part, as this is where workforce software often fails in the background. The rules about work don’t stay the same. They change between states, businesses, and sectors, and one mistake on the payroll can lead to legal trouble. Infor WFM builds pay rules and alert systems that can be changed into the platform and keeps real-time records that are ready for auditing. That may or may not be enough depending on how complicated an organization’s regulatory environment is, which can be very different. For some business customers, the compliance tools might be the main reason they chose the platform in the first place.
It looks like Infor WFM has really taken off in the healthcare field. The platform has features called Clinical Science and Clinical Bridge that work with electronic medical records to make sure that staffing levels are in line with real-time data on patient workload, so nurses don’t have to enter that data by hand. People have used Children’s of Alabama as an example because it is one of the largest pediatric medical centers in the country and has seen improvements in operational efficiency and staff satisfaction after putting the plan into action. When other health care systems look at the platform, that kind of example is likely to be taken seriously.
An important part of the platform that people don’t always notice is the self-service for employees. Frontline workers can look at their schedules, switch shifts, ask for time off, and bid on open shifts from their phones thanks to mobile tools. It may seem like a simple change, but when hourly workers haven’t had much control over their own schedules in the past, it can have a big impact on their motivation and retention. The question of whether companies fully implement these features or leave them untapped is a different one, and one that users question.
According to Gartner Peer Insights, Infor WFM gets about 4.3 stars. Users have said nice things about the platform’s many features and ability to adapt to complicated settings. Most of the complaints are about cost and the inability to grow for smaller businesses, which brings up an important point: It looks like Infor WFM was really made for large businesses, and a medium-sized company might not need or be able to handle it.
Based on the direction this type of software is going, it seems like Infor is counting on AI-powered forecasting and cloud infrastructure to set itself apart in the future. It is built on what Infor calls its “Industry Cloud Platform” and runs on AWS. It remains to be seen if that foundation will hold up as the needs of the workforce continue to change, with more remote work, gig-adjacent staffing models, and changing laws about fair scheduling. For now, Infor WFM has a good place in the enterprise workforce management space. This is especially true for companies that have a lot of workers that are hard to manage any other way.
