Infor and Anthropic announced a partnership on November 12 that lets manufacturing teams investigate production problems, check delivery options, and approve changes to ERP orders from a Claude conversation. The integration, called Infor Industry AI for Claude, is available to select Infor Velocity Suite customers. Infor’s published setup guide covers Infor M3 and identifies three roles for the initial workflows: production planners, buyers, and customer service representatives.
A buyer can use Claude to see which manufacturing and customer orders depend on a late supplier delivery, review alternatives, and authorize a change to a purchase order. Claude retrieves live records from Infor, uses instructions tailored to the buyer’s role to assess the options, and presents the proposed action for review. Once the user approves a specific change, the transaction runs in Infor under that user’s existing permissions.
The agreement also makes Claude Infor’s preferred AI assistant for interacting with its products and Anthropic’s Claude models the preferred models for powering Infor Industry AI. Customers can continue working in Infor’s own role-based workspaces and GenAI Assistant.
How the integration handles three manufacturing workflows
Production planning: Finding the cause of an at-risk order
A production planner can ask which manufacturing orders are at risk and see whether the problem is a material shortage, a machine capacity constraint, or a labor shortage. For a material shortfall, Claude can examine what has already been issued to production, what inventory is available, and whether open purchase orders will arrive in time. If capacity is the issue, it can examine alternatives. If the original schedule is no longer feasible, Claude can propose a new date for the planner to review and identify customer orders that may be affected.
The documented M3 planner workflow includes actions such as rescheduling a manufacturing order and creating a planned purchase order. The planner reviews the proposed change before the integration sends it to M3.
Purchasing: Tracing the impact of a supplier delay
Infor illustrates the buyer workflow with a supplier that expects to deliver 20 days late. Claude can trace the delayed component through production orders, subassemblies, and finished products to identify the customer deliveries at risk. It can then evaluate alternative suppliers or materials. One option in Infor’s example is to place an expedited purchase order for the quantity needed immediately and keep the original order open for the remaining demand.
Infor’s M3 plugin documentation also describes a buyer dashboard that ranks purchasing issues by the orders that depend on them. That gives a buyer a way to distinguish a late receipt that threatens a production run from one that existing stock can cover.
Customer service: Checking whether a rush delivery is feasible
When a customer asks for an earlier delivery, a representative can check finished stock across warehouses, see which quantities are already allocated, and review whether production could fill the shortfall. If moving stock would affect another customer’s order, Claude can identify that order and present options for review. The representative can then confirm a feasible delivery date or offer an alternative while speaking with the customer. The documented M3 workflow also supports actions such as updating planned order dates and reallocating stock, subject to user approval and permissions.
What Claude can see and change in Infor M3
The integration has two parts. The connector uses the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, to make selected M3 transactions available to Claude through Infor ION API Gateway. The plugin supplies the instructions and dashboards for each role. Tool calls run under the signed-in M3 user’s identity. Infor says single sign-on and existing role-based permissions determine which records the user can access and which transactions the user can perform. Actions taken through the connector are recorded in Infor.
Infor’s setup guide describes how M3 administrators can restrict the fields returned to Claude and disable individual transaction tools. Administrators can also configure read-only access by omitting or disabling tools that change records. When write access is enabled, Infor says the plugin is designed to ask for explicit approval for each proposed change. The ERP’s authorization rules still apply when the transaction runs.
Kevin Samuelson, CEO of Infor, said the combination gives manufacturers access to industry-specific context and Infor’s controls from either interface. Lauren Collett, Anthropic’s head of enterprise industries go-to-market, pointed to the time workers spend moving information between systems. “Manufacturing depends on expertise spread across many systems,” she said. Jessica Vincent, vice president of business solutions at Oldcastle APG, said connecting Claude to Infor could make relevant business data easier for employees to find while maintaining the company’s governance requirements. Infor’s announcement did not report measured results from an Oldcastle APG deployment.
Who can use the connector now
Infor is offering the integration to select Velocity Suite customers. Customers need their own eligible Claude plan, and the connector requires administrator activation. For the documented M3 setup, the customer needs Velocity Suite on the M3 tenant, an Infor administrator to register Claude in ION API Gateway, and an M3 account for each user. On Claude Team and Enterprise plans, an authorized organization administrator must enable the connector.
ERP News previously covered Infor’s AI agents for distribution ERP, including purchasing, quoting, and fulfillment tools in the Infor GenAI Assistant. The November 12 agreement adds a Claude interface for the manufacturing workflows documented for M3. Infor plans to add roles, skills, and applications over time. It has yet to publish a broader rollout schedule and has scheduled a December 3 demonstration of the three initial workflows.
Sources
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