Miami – After a three-year hiatus due to Covid, IFS (Industrial & Financial Systems), a global giant of enterprise software platforms (ERP, EAM, ESM, FSM, etc.), brought together all of its partners and main customers last month in Florida, at a convention called IFS Unleashed. The CEO, Darren Roos, at the helm since 2018, veteran of SAP and Software AG, claims double-digit growth for 4 years.
Net revenues for 2021 grew by 14% compared to 2020, to around €620 million. Explanation: a move towards the very profitable Cloud (+105% of turnover in 2021) and a succession of well-targeted takeovers: this summer, Ultimo, an EAM (Enterprise asset management) solution in the Cloud, in SaaS mode; the Axios/Assyst help desk or even the creation of the joint venture Arcwide, an engineering and integration services company born of a merger with Bearing Point.
IFS, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2023, is still headquartered in Linköping (200 km southwest of Stockholm). Originally, this editor classified in the ERP, was known for its specialized ‘best of breed’ solutions for critical sites such as nuclear power plants. “We are number 1 worldwide in EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) and FSM (Field Service Management) solutions and number 3 in ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning),” said Darren Roos.
But another key term is emerging here: the concept of “servitizing”, or the ability to deliver new services, with partnerships as an extension of production. This is exactly the case of Bénéteau in France, which recently chose IFS as part of its 5-year strategic plan, with, among other objectives, the replacement and standardization of its multiple ERPs (‘in-house’ and Infor) oriented design and manufacturing. One of the challenges is to industrialize and automate a good part of the manual, very expert tasks. The boating champion wants to gain in agility and transversality in order to position itself on new services (rental of day-boats, etc.).
Vincent Dubois, sales manager in France (Engineering / construction / Infrastructures sector), confirms an organization structured around five major sectors:
- Aerospace and defense and manufacturing
- Energy, utilities and retail distribution
- Engineering, construction, infrastructure
- The manufacturing sector
- Services. In France and Europe, IFS has key partners, including Capgemini and Arcwide. Its customer portfolio includes highly loyal companies, such as NGE, SPIE, Bénéteau, Samsic… and even Schoeller-Allibert.
Innovation goals
In its areas of strategic development, IFS lists digital twins, contextual intelligence, augmented reality, the Internet of Things, automatons or robots and simulation solutions. Innovations (see release 22R2) primarily target user experience, automation (with AI and machine learning), enrichment of reporting and analysis functions, vertical and horizontal integration (on a unified data platform), IoT connectivity and new ESG support services (or CSR; environment, social and governance). To this must be added the sustainable environment dimension: CSR reporting, for direct and indirect CO2 emissions (electrical, heating, cooling, etc.).
With regard to the management of “human capital”, the innovation here too is pragmatic: provision of skills profiles in inter-company, multi-company contexts; or even the possibility of reassigning tasks in the field or evaluating the services delivered. Another objective: in the manufacturing industry and aeronautics, IFS knows that the race is for execution deadlines. Hence an offer adapted to maintenance service providers (MRO).
A cloud turn without haste
The installed base of IFS has only recently taken the Cloud shift, around the IFS Cloud offer, capable of integrating management solutions for assets, supply chain, production, finance, HR …
Could this ignition delay be the result of companies, often positioned in the manufacturing industry and ‘utilities’ services (energy, air transport, etc.), which have remained culturally attached to ‘on-premise’? Things have changed: the Cloud offer is the one that is developing the most at IFS.
Sustainable monitoring solution, management of ‘assets’, connected objects: everything is now based on the IFS Cloud designed to support all kinds of ‘workloads’. This offer also has its particularity: IFS offers hosting, management of applications and their maintenance / support, as well as consulting, – all in a ‘single tenant’ approach: the platform, unique and duplicated, is shared ; the client bodies are compartmentalised, watertight – as Vincent Dubois points out.
In the ‘analytics’ approach, IFS Cloud has just added an analysis engine working in RAM (‘in memory’) which replaces the old version of the ‘cubes’ type of BI; installation and configuration are highly automated, reducing the pressure on the technical expertise required. ‘Plug-ins’ provide new functionalities such as process exploration and forecasts. The priority is the integration of functional analysis models and a greater granularity of reference data for the forecast (“zoom in”) and, here again, in a transverse way (CRM, HR, project management, purchasing , sales, maintenance, etc.).
In short, we understand that IFS is positioning itself beyond the approach and scope of an ERP: “We will no longer be doing ERP as before, but something broader,” sums up Darren Roos.
Specialized ‘workflows’
In addition, IFS encourages and helps its customers to develop ‘workflows’, automation processes, such as, for example, that of customer orders, with the use of OCR (optical character recognition), with NER (named entity recognition) or even with classification of keywords.
Another example of ‘workflow’: monitoring exchange rates; the ‘workflow’ facilitates the automatic search for rates by drawing from external service providers. This is also the case for automated expense management: here learning by AI (Artificial Intelligence) makes it possible to capture expense reports or invoices and automatically publish accounting statements until payment (after verification thresholds, validation by electronic signature, etc.)
Managed services offer
In terms of services, IFS has a good card with its “branch” Arcwide, a joint venture born a few months ago from a merger with Bearing Point. Here again, this is an option which, in France, perfectly satisfies a client like Bénéteau, who was already working with… Bearing Point. Arcwide has become consistent: soon a hundred customers in 12 countries (soon, the United States), $35 million in turnover, 250 consultants in the field (and soon more than double). Another service, – that of the Assyst ‘help desk’, resulting from the recent takeover of Axios, based in Edinburgh (Scotland); it will be free for one year, in 2023, in order to encourage the installation of ESM (enterprise service management), ITSM (Service management) or even ITOM (operations Management (ITOM) solutions. IFS won’t stop there…