Most people have at least experimented with collaborating on documents through cloud-based file-sharing programs such as Google Docs or Dropbox. Software company Infor is now bringing that concept to the business application world with its new Infor Ming.le application.

Infor Ming.le comes standard with Infor Supply Chain Execution (SCE) version 10.3 and acts like a social media collaboration tool. Through the application, you can build communities or groups and "follow" people, organizations, customers, or suppliers. The application allows you to receive alerts tied to specific customers or facilities, for example, and use the application to communicate and collaborate with other people without leaving your enterprise resource planning (ERP) or SCE system.

For example, one of Infor's customers conducted a pilot using Infor Ming.le to handle a recall situation, says Vishal Minocha, senior global product manager for supply chain execution at Infor. A warehouse manager in Dallas discovered that he needed to recall a specific lot of product that was shipping to a customer. When the manager entered an inventory code to quarantine that product, alerts were sent to managers of other warehouses around the country that carried the same product. After one of those managers received the alert, he contacted the first, letting him know that the product in his facility did not have that lot code and could be used to fulfill the customer's order. The first manager then transferred the order over to be fulfilled from the second facility.

Infor is also rolling out an app that can be downloaded from Apple's App Store to view warehouse metrics and information on a manager's iPad. The new app, Warehouse Director, includes "velocity heat maps," color-coded maps of the warehouse that quickly show managers where the highest levels of picking activity are taking place.