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Imperial Industries takes Infor XA output beyond the standard

Two weeks after go-live, the Wisconsin manufacturer is running its Infor XA documents through InterformNG2 and into Infor Document Management, with label printing next.

Published 03-09-2026

Industry: Manufacturing
Business area: Vacuum tanks and bulk storage
Country: United States
ERP: Infor XA on IBM i

Customer overview

Imperial Industries, Inc. builds vacuum tanks and trucks for septic, portable restroom and specialist applications, along with bulk storage tanks and silos, from its base in Rothschild, Wisconsin. The company has been manufacturing for more than 42 years, having grown out of an agricultural equipment business, and now supplies municipalities, service fleets and industrial facilities across the United States.

Design engineering, fabrication, welding, testing and service all sit under one roof, which gives Imperial direct control of quality and lead times. The business runs on Infor XA.

The challenge

The hardest part of the project was not the documents. Before InterformNG2 could build anything, the source data had to come out of the IBM i reliably, and one manufacturing document would not generate at all. That held the project up for a period until it was resolved at source.

Once the data was available, the document work moved quickly.

The project

Imperial’s output requirements went past what Infor XA covers on its own. The company chose InterformNG2 for document output and went live in mid August 2026. Shawn Edmondson, Director of Information Technology, reports a go-live with no major issues, just the usual collection of small items to clear and nothing that held the business up.

A deliberate decision shaped the work. Rather than continue with flat spool files, Imperial converted its output to XML. Where the data arriving from XA needed tidying, Shawn wrote XPath expressions himself to normalise it before it reached the document.

What Imperial is using

Documents are the first phase. InterformNG2 collects output from the IBM i out queues and spool files, builds the document, and delivers it into Infor Document Management, so a purchase order reissued to a vendor carries a version history rather than an untraceable second print. Paper is produced only where paper is wanted. A small number of documents, cheques among them, were deliberately left as flat files where there was no benefit in converting them.

Shawn builds and maintains the workflows himself. Adeel Ghulam Hussain at Interform supplies document corrections, most of them returned within the hour. The manufacturing order was the most complex document in the set; the rest were straightforward.

"Our output needs went beyond what XA does on its own. InterformNG2 closed that gap completely - and I am absolutely loving it."

Shawn Edmondson, Director of Information Technology, Imperial Industries, Inc.

Looking ahead

Label printing is the next phase, using the same designer and the same workflow model that Imperial already knows. Advanced PDF, which merges related transaction documents into statements and reminders, is under discussion for later.

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Waterworks owns its customer documents after moving to Infor M3

A luxury bath and kitchen brand migrated from JD Edwards to Infor M3 and chose InterformNG2 to tailor every client-facing document, from product labels to branded customer emails.

Danbury, Connecticut, United States

Industry: Retail and manufacturing
Business area: Luxury bath and kitchen
Country: United States
ERP: Infor M3

Customer overview

Waterworks is a luxury bath and kitchen brand, founded in 1978 and headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut. Now part of RH (Restoration Hardware), the company is both a designer and a specialty retailer: virtually all of its products are designed in-house and custom-built around the world, primarily in Europe. They are sold through Waterworks showrooms in the US, London and Paris (opened 2026-06-02), alongside direct channels and independent boutiques. The product range spans bath and kitchen fixtures, surfaces, lighting and home textiles, supporting high-end residential design and renovation projects.

In a sector where every customer touchpoint extends the brand, documentation matters at every stage, from the showroom order to the labelled product arriving on a project site. Waterworks runs Infor M3 as its core ERP platform, having migrated from JD Edwards Enterprise One in early 2026. The Interform setup is owned and maintained internally by the Waterworks team.

The challenge

Before Waterworks moved to Infor M3, document output was handled through Bottomline Transform alongside a heavily customised JD Edwards Enterprise One environment. The setup worked for basic documents but offered little room to tailor output. Templates were rigid, formed around a fill-in-the-blanks approach that did not match the white-glove standard Waterworks applies to every customer interaction.

As the company prepared to move to Infor M3, it became clear that the native M3 document tool, IDM, would face similar limitations. IDM could store and push documents, but it could not handle the kind of branching and data combination Waterworks needed, particularly when client-facing documents had to pull data from M3 alongside a separate product system to build a single, accurate product label or order document.

Beyond labels, Waterworks needed customer documents that grouped product lines by room, such as master bath one, master bath two and child bathroom, in a way that neither JD Edwards nor M3 produced natively. With around 150,000 products in the catalogue, a print estate of around 60 printers spanning warehouse, logistics and back-office operations, and a customer experience built on precise, branded documentation, the organisation needed an output platform that could match the complexity of its operations without becoming a bottleneck for IT or the sales team.

The project

Waterworks selected InterformNG2 on the recommendation of its M3 implementation partner, Wipro, and after reviewing the wider Output Management options available alongside Infor. The flexibility of the platform was the decisive factor. Where Bottomline Transform had forced documents into a fixed shape, InterformNG2 allowed Waterworks to build workflows that branch by customer, by product type and by payment method, all within a single document logic.

Interform now drives the full range of customer-facing output at Waterworks. Custom product labels, built by combining M3 data with information from a separate product system, print across approximately 30 Zebra label printers and support warehouse and shipping operations every day. Customer emails carry embedded product imagery drawn from the company’s catalogue of around 150,000 products, and order and invoice documents are grouped by room rather than by order line. Internal documents that did not need this level of tailoring were left in IDM.

Departments using Interform-generated documents include accounts receivable, warehouse, product, customer service and sales. Adam Pringnitz, ERP Senior Technical Analyst at Waterworks, owns the Interform build day to day, working closely with the IT team led by John Savarese, Senior Manager, ERP & Support. The rollout ran alongside the M3 go-live in early 2026 and was completed without disruption to the wider programme. Waterworks pointed to the responsiveness and personal availability of the Interform team during go-live, including senior staff being reachable outside normal hours when questions came up, as a defining part of the experience.

The results

With InterformNG2 in place, Waterworks now owns its customer-facing document layer in a way it never could under JD Edwards. Changes that previously required a request to an external consultancy can now be made internally, in the same week they are needed, without paying for or waiting on developer time.

The sales team, which spent years working within the constraints of older templates, has used the move to redesign existing documents and introduce new ones, including dedicated formats for trade customers, that match the level of presentation Waterworks expects of its products.

For end customers, the practical result is a clearer document. Orders covering multiple rooms arrive grouped by space rather than as a flat list. Emails carry visual context drawn from the product repository, so customers receiving deliveries weeks or months after specifying can see what they ordered, not just a code on a line.

Across the broader programme, which included a full M3 migration, the Interform rollout itself stood out for its simplicity and the level of support during go-live. For Waterworks, the customer-facing document layer has moved from a maintenance burden under JD Edwards to an in-house capability the team is proud of.

Interform is simple and flexible. We own our output, and we can beautify our documents. It’s a tool that we can make ours.

Adam Pringnitz, ERP Senior Technical Analyst, Waterworks

Looking ahead

Waterworks expects InterformNG2 to remain the platform for client-facing output and is reviewing which remaining IDM documents could benefit from being moved across as tailoring requirements grow. With the rollout less than a year old, the focus over the coming months is on continuing to build out the workflow library and supporting the sales team as they refine document designs across the catalogue.

With the Paris showroom now open and the brand continuing to extend its international footprint, multi-language output is moving from a project requirement to a regular part of the Interform workload. The team plans to handle additional languages within the same workflow logic as Waterworks reaches new markets.

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United States