How IFS Applications 9 Delivers True Business Agility · 2016-03-28 · strategic CRM. In addition, IFS Applications 9 is complemented by our existing line of iPhone, Android and

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RHOW IFS APPLICATIONS™ 9 DELIVERS TRUE BUSINESS AGILITY

HIGHLIGHTS

April, 2015

By Dan MatthewsChief Technology Officer, IFS AB

IFS Applications™ 9 has been built to deliver business agility by bringing users closer to their businesses, increasing their flexibility in running them, and maximizing their ability to take advantage of change.

IFS Applications 9’s main user interface—IFS Enterprise Explorer™—is designed to work equally well on a tablet with touch screen as it is on a laptop with an external monitor attached. It understands the device it is used on and adapts accordingly, and is therefore a perfect fit for hybrid laptops.

IFS Applications 9 delivers two new exciting pieces of functionality to provide flexible real-time visibility into the business for all users —IFS Streams™ and IFS Lobby.

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CONTENT

MEETING THE DEMAND FOR INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC FUNCTIONALITY ................................ 2

PROVIDING COMPREHENSIVE ACCESS FROM MOBILE DEVICES ................................... 3

EXTENDING FUNCTIONALITY WITH EMBEDDED CRM .................................................... 4

LAYERED ARCHITECTURE: NO MORE “STANDARD VERSUS CUSTOMIZED” CONUNDRUM 5

MANAGEMENT OF GLOBAL OPERATIONS ..................................................................... 6

REAL-TIME VISIBILITY THROUGH STREAMS AND IFS LOBBY™ ....................................... 7

CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................. 9

ABOUT IFS ................................................................................................................ 11

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HOW IFS APPLICATIONS 9 DELIVERS TRUE BUSINESS AGILITY

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker 1 Sull, Donald, “How to Thrive in Turbulent Markets,” Harvard Business Review, February 2009.

Peter Drucker1 once observed, “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.” In today’s rapidly changing, often-volatile mar-ketplace, where uncertainty is frequently a daunting characteristic of business competition, those making decisions need to be courageous and agile. In fact, business agility is increasingly a defining characteristic of those organizations that thrive in today’s commercial environment. What is it? How does one attain it?

In a Harvard Business Review article, Donald Sull, visiting professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the London Business School, defined organizational agility as a company’s ability to consistently identify and capture business opportunities more quickly than its rivals do.2 Sull breaks down three types of organizational agility:

• OPERATIONAL: within a focused business model, consistently identifying and seizing opportunities more quickly than competitors.

• PORTFOLIO: quickly shifting resources from less-promising businesses into more-attractive alternatives.

• STRATEGIC: identifying and seizing game-changing opportunities when they arrive.

From our perspective, all these approaches require true business agility, a capa-bility fostered by being as close as possible to one’s business, having maximum flexibility to respond to events as they emerge, and being able to capitalize on change. When an organization has this capability, those driving it can make decisions to move the company successfully forward into the future, confi-dently and courageously.

IFS Applications™ 9 has been built to deliver business agility by bringing users closer to their businesses, increasing their flexibility in running them, and maximizing their ability to take advantage of change. This is what businesses require of their investment in enterprise technology, and this paper examines specific ways that IFS Applications 9 has been enhanced to better meet that requirement:

HOW IFS APPLICATIONS™ 9 DELIVERS TRUE BUSINESS AGILITY

IFS Applications™ 9 has been built to deliver business agility by bringing users closer to their businesses, increasing their flexibility in running them, and maximizing their ability to take advantage of change.

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“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”

• More industry-specific functionality gives a closer solution fit to the business

• Comprehensive access from mobile devices

• Embedded customer relationship management (CRM)

• Layered application architecture

• Management of global operations

• At-a-glance real time view of the business for any role or process.

• Visualizing information in clever ways to gain better insight into what it means

MEETING THE DEMAND FOR INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC FUNCTIONALITYA recent survey of manufacturing executives conducted by IFS and analyst Cindy Jutras found that 67 percent of them required industry-specific functionality in enterprise applications, and even those that didn’t still expressed a desire for it.3 Those who required industry-specific functionality were 12 percent less likely to have implemented ERP than those who did not, indicating that the lack of a proper solution fit caused some to delay the investment in enterprise technology.

The study determined that the types of processes a business was involved in were a key indicator of which businesses required greater industry- specific functionality: Those involved with extensive customer collaboration in high value, complex projects reported a greater need, as did those involved with man-agement of large fixed assets (think heavy duty machinery) and service management. Among those companies with the most pronounced need for greater specialized functionality were those where managing return on assets is a core discipline. The need for ERP with enterprise asset manage-ment (EAM) or enterprise service management (ESM) functionality creates a “perfect storm” that many enterprise solutions do not handle well.

Lack of industry-specific functionality negatively impacted enterprise technology in several ways, including lower productivity through additional non-value added work and lack of visibility across the enterprise.

No solution handles this storm better than IFS Applications 9, which includes ERP, EAM, and ESM functionality for specific industries, such as aerospace and defense, automotive, construction and contracting, energy and

3 IFS ERP Survey: The Demand for Industry-Specific ERP, Mint Jutras, 2011.

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IFS Applications 9’s main user interface—IFS Enterprise Explorer™—is designed to work equally well on a tablet with touch screen as it is on a laptop with an external monitor attached. It understands the device it is used on and adapts accordingly, and is therefore a perfect fit for hybrid laptops.

utilities, high-tech, industrial manufacturing (discrete and process), oil and gas, service providers, and other asset-intensive sectors.

IFS Applications 9, like any new version of our products, includes several hundreds of enhancements designed for the specific needs of the demanding industries we serve. Many of these are suggested to us by our industry adviso-ry councils and global user groups, with a high percentage of those suggestions making it into the next version or subsequent update. Other enhancements we arrive at proactively through our deep involvement with our customers’ indus-tries, or collaboratively with specific groups of customers. The result is appli-cations that are a closer fit to your business.

PROVIDING COMPREHENSIVE ACCESS FROM MOBILE DEVICESAccording to CRN, quarterly sales of Microsoft® Surface Pro are closing in on $1 billion, a testament to consumer and business user response to Surface Pro 3, the latest iteration of the hybrid laptop, but also another indication of the dramatic rise of tablet and hybrid tablet computers.4 These statistics provide support to what we see around us every day: the world, including the business world, is increasingly run on mobile devices.

IFS Applications 9 is well adapted for this brave new world. IFS Applications 9’s main user interface—IFS Enterprise Explorer™—is designed to work equally well on a tablet with touch screen as it is on a laptop with an external monitor attached. It understands the device it is used on and adapts accordingly, and is therefore a perfect fit for hybrid laptops. Size and placement of commands have been organized so that they are easily reachable with the thumbs (when holding the tablet) as well as with a mouse. Input is possible with both soft and hard keyboards. The user interface scales and looks great on a modern ultra-high resolution display like that of the Surface Pro 3.

IFS Applications is a natural fit for the new generation of hybrid laptops like the Microsoft Surface Pro 3.

4 Whiting, Rick, “Quarterly Sales of Microsoft Surface Pro Closing In on $1 Billion,” crn.com, October 23, 2014.

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IFS Applications 9 moves further away from the rest of the pack in terms of the ability to deliver back-office, strategic CRM.

In addition, IFS Applications 9 is complemented by our existing line of iPhone, Android and Windows IFS Touch Apps™ so you can perform tasks like approvals, time reporting, and expense management while on the move.

EXTENDING FUNCTIONALITY WITH EMBEDDED CRMIFS Applications has long offered a tightly integrated CRM solution, allowing a back office approach to CRM. Rather than just contact management, this approach has allowed our customers access to operational data by customer —essential in project-driven activities like engineer-to-order (ETO) and engineering, procurement and construction (EPC), or simply for improving communication with customers. When you have that customer on the phone, integration with finance can let you know if there are outstanding invoices. Integration with engineering gives you visibility into design projects you may be engaged in together. CRM has been a strength for IFS Applications, but this has not been a perfect world. Any integration becomes an issue when setting up more complex relationships (e.g. from opportunity to sales to contract delivery), and changes to operational processes require some consulting or systems integration work.

While we have long offered CRM tightly integrated with ERP and the rest of the enterprise suite, we take this a step further with IFS Applications 9 by completely embedding CRM into the application suite. No longer are we moving data back and forth between different applications through replication or duplication. Data is now available in real time, which improves insight, customer service and more.

Again, this moves IFS Applications 9 further away from the rest of the pack in terms of the ability to deliver back-office, strategic CRM. Any solution touting truly embedded CRM must answer the following questions affirmatively:

• Is it the same user experience regardless of where I access CRM data?

• Can I log into the same client and move back and forth without multiple applications?

• Can I see CRM data from my back office in real time?

• Do the back-office components offer the same potential to extend the data model and user experience as does the CRM product? CRM is generally highly extensible, and in fully embedded CRM this flexibility must cut across to the rest of the application suite.

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Whereas mobility is not yet a universal feature of today’s enterprise applications, it is rapidly emerging as a component that is destined to become standard. …Enterprise software leaders such as IFS have anticipated this development….

IFS Applications 9 passes this test, and that means it will bring you closer to your customers by exposing back office activities to customer-facing personnel and expose customer realities to back-office staff.

We all understand that a salesperson negotiating with a customer might want to know if the customer has existing outstanding invoices, so they need access to back office data on finance. But if you are in the finance department and you are about to call a customer on an overdue invoice, you might want to know that a significant opportunity is about to close with that customer.

LAYERED ARCHITECTURE: NO MORE “STANDARD VERSUS CUSTOMIZED” CONUNDRUMIn attempting to be agile, one historical problem for companies from an IT perspective has been the time and cost of rolling out and incorporating technological advances. Companies struggle to stay updated, largely because they’ve modified their solution. Those modifications must be uplifted to each new version of the software, increasing the cost and complexity of upgrades. Naturally, this is a disincentive to staying current on version and adopting new, beneficial, technologies and functionality. However, IFS Applications 9 incorporates layered application architecture to address this problem.

The first line of defense must always be to avoid modifications. After all, the right business solution will include sufficient industry-specific functionality to meet core business requirements, and indeed, may encompass best practices a company in your industry would do well to adopt. The second line of defense is to achieve the effect of modifications through configuration, which is less expensive and disruptive than modifications to code. For example, IFS customers are avoiding and eliminating existing modifications by leveraging custom fields, which were added in IFS Applications 8. These custom fields are made even more powerful in IFS Applications 9, which offers custom objects, pages, relationships, business rules and other features designed to give customers the ability to extend and adapt the data model as well as user experience through configuration.

IFS Applications 9 introduces a third line of defense—an elegant approach to dealing with the few modifications that may be legitimately necessary to meet very specific requirements unique to a given company or niche industry. If customization is needed, it is now done in a separate layer, making it simpler to upgrade the standard product because the modifications no longer need to be uplifted. It’s faster, easier, less expensive, and better suited to capitalize on technological gains.

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Traditionally, companies have faced a difficult choice: choose a standard solution and accept compromises and manual workarounds or modify the source code and pay significantly more. The use of a layered application architecture, custom fields and objects and deep industry-specific functionality eliminates this either-or dilemma.

This is particularly important with the proliferation of customers running IFS Applications in the cloud, where the pace of change is faster and the appli-cations are being administered by a third party not intimately familiar with your business and modifications. Leveraging a layered application architecture is a big part of the answer.

MANAGEMENT OF GLOBAL OPERATIONS Today, companies of all sizes need to think about operating across multiple locations, companies or continents, as well as across different divisions and legal entities. This poses challenges both to the business processes and to the technical operation of the software.

Global business is not new, and business applications like IFS Applications have long supported the key elements of multi-language, multi-company, multi-division, multi-national, multi-currency, multi-mode requirements. However, globalization continues, and the way businesses operate is maturing, with organizations increasingly moving from being multi-national to being truly global. As businesses transition from multi-national through international to global, their business processes change from “multi” to “spanning across”. This change affects all areas. New functions in IFS Applications 9 enhance existing capabilities for managing a matrixed, complex organization. IFS Applications has long offered deep capabilities for intra-company transactions, but in this new version, we see unprecedented levels of agility for handling environments where staff, materials and customers associated with multiple legal entities are involved in a single project or ongoing process.

Controlling the flow of information and value across the complex organization is one challenge. Supporting a globally accessible, highly available, and absolutely mission-critical application is a tall order for technology staff.

So although IFS Applications 9 is available in any deployment model a company chooses, we expect that an increasing number will choose to let their

New functions in IFS Applications 9 enhance existing capabilities for managing a matrixed, complex organization.

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application vendor take care of the operations in a managed cloud. For IFS Applications 9 specifically it can be hosted on Microsoft Azure™, and IFS is offering the managed cloud services to take care of things. For midsize firms with limited IT staffs and budgets, a cloud deployment option makes it possible to run a highly available, redundant, and secure IFS Applications environment without large infrastructures or investments in specialized staff members such as database administrators. IFS customers and partners can also use Microsoft Azure™ to set up temporary environments (e.g., testing, training) that they can decommission when no longer needed.

Moreover, in today’s rapidly changing business environment, Azure enables fluid provisioning as resources and demand for capacity move around the globe. IFS Applications 9 comes with a range of services and support available to companies wherever they operate—support that follows the sun—helping them locally with the strength and resources of a global organization.

REAL-TIME VISIBILITY THROUGH STREAMS AND IFS LOBBY™

IFS Applications 9 delivers two new exciting pieces of functionality to provide flexible real-time visibility into the business for all users—IFS Streams™ and IFS Lobby.

Each of us has to work to remember to follow up on things. Perhaps we write notes to ourselves, put sticky notes on our screen, send ourselves an email, or book something on our calendar. But we are all trying to get away from manual follow-up, which is why we offer subscriptions in IFS Streams. Let’s say there was a purchase order that was delayed and I really need to know ASAP when the goods I have ordered arrive. Before, I would have had to make a note to myself to remember to go back and check the status of that purchase order later on. With IFS Streams, it is a simple matter for an end user to sub-scribe to status changes for that purchase order. This is something I can do myself in a couple of clicks with no assistance from IT. In addition to sub-scriptions, IFS Streams also folds in notifications (for example when someone replies to one of your posts) from our IFS Talk™ enterprise social module, and notifications of new tasks you are assigned. Notifications and other objects in IFS Streams offer drill-down capabilities to the screens where the requisite action can be taken.

IFS Applications 9 delivers two new exciting pieces of functionality to provide flexible real-time visibility into the business for all users—IFS Streams™ and IFS Lobby

IFS Applications 9 can be run on Microsoft Azure™, and IFS is offering the managed cloud services to take care of things.

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IFS Lobby offers powerful, flexible role-based interfaces to meet your specific needs

IFS Applications also offers a new and intuitive way to interact with enterprise applications. IFS Lobby is designed to function like the lobby of a hotel, with centralized information sources, meeting places and access to the various parts of the property, such as guest rooms, the ballrooms, restaurants and other facilities.

IFS Lobby provides this entry point to the application in a fashion that is easily tailored for each role and process in a company.

These lobbies are operational tools that provide an actual “here and now” situation view for a month-end process, project, procurement, sales, shop floor operations and more.

Think about what you do when you need a heads up—what’s waiting in tomorrow’s workday. You can take out your smartphone and look in your inbox or your calendar. Let’s say you’re someone in the finance department, working with invoices and similar documents. You’re getting close to the end of the month or quarter, so it’s time to close the books. You want to get a heads up on the situation. However, it’s Saturday or Sunday afternoon, and you know that people have been working over the weekend, but you have not; Monday is the last day of the month. Do you need to go in at 6 a.m. or 9 a.m.? How panicked should you be?

IFS Lobby is designed to function like the lobby of a hotel, with centralized information sources, meeting places and access to the various parts of the property...

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If you’re in that situation, with previous enterprise software products, typical-ly you must check lots of places, dig through emails, run lots of queries, see what needs to be chased down, find the status of revenue, etc. It’s really diffi-cult to get an overview in a quick and easy way. But now, with IFS Lobby, you have everything at your fingertips with an “at a glance” overview to those working with a particular process.

This is a significant change in how users will work with IFS Applications. It’s a simple, focused, comprehensible view that helps users monitor, work by exception, and focus on the important things in the current situation. Three important points about the IFS Lobby:

• 35-plus out-of-the-box lobbies are available for roles or processes.

• Users can take their lobbies with them and use them wherever they are on a device of their choosing—no matter what their operational role.

• Lobbies can be tailored without developer skills and without the need to deliver, install or restart anything. Not all organizations work in the same way, thus anything built for a role needs to be tailored to the organization. In the past, if you needed to change anything, you needed developer skills to build a customization which had to be ordered, developed, tested, installed, etc. This was not only a cumbersome process, but also one that consumed time, energy, and money. So quite often role-based views were demonstrated, looked good, but not used in operational practice. IFS Applications 9 solves this by providing tailoring capabilities for business people, without the need to deliver or install anything.

IFS Applications 9 offers other routes to the power of visualization to bring users closer to their businesses and give a better understanding of what’s going on within them. More built-in visualizations have been added to more places in the application, with charts and graphs being embedded in multiple func-tional screens. Any data anywhere can also now be viewed in chart mode as you would be able to in Microsoft Excel® .

CONCLUSIONAccording to the futurist Stewart Brand5, “Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.” In today’s business environment, where accelerating technology is a fact of life, compa-nies that are flat on their back are likely in that position because they lacked business agility.

IFS Applications 9 is built to keep them upright and moving ahead.

5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand

“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”

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As the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at IFS, Dan’s responsibilities encompass research-ing, formulating, and communicating the strategic direction for IFS Applications. To this end Dan leads the Research & Strategy unit within IFS, as well as manages IFS’s part-nerships with Microsoft, Oracle and other players. With one foot deep in the IT industry and the other firmly grounded in dialog with IFS’s customers across industries, Dan is in a unique position to see new trends in business technology both from the vendors and the customers’ point of view. Dan is a frequent speaker at IFS and industry events. Since joining IFS in 1996, Dan has held a number of positions within the company including software engineer and project manager. Early in his IFS career, Dan played a vital role in the initial development of a graphical user interface for IFS Applications. Recently, he has been the driving force behind the innovative IFS Enterprise Explorer user interface, with the aim of bringing good design and true user productivity to enterprise applications, and IFS Touch Apps, bringing the use of smartphones to enterprises. Prior to joining the company, Dan ran his own software development business. Having started the company during his final two years studying computer science and software engineering at the Linköping Institute of Technology, Dan chose to move on to IFS in order to be part of a larger organization and further develop his skills. Outside of the workplace, Dan pursues his hobbies of carpentry and cross-country skiing.

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www.IFSWORLD.comCOPYRIGHT © 2015 INDUSTRIAL AND FINANCIAL SYSTEMS, IFS AB (PUBL). IFS AND ALL IFS PRODUCTS AND SERVICES NAMES ARE TRADEMARKS OF IFS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS DOCUMENT MAY CONTAIN STATEMENTS OF POSSIBLE FUTURE FUNCTIONALIT Y FOR IFS’S PRODUCTS AND TECHNOLOGY. SUCH STATEMENTS ARE FOR INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY AND SHOULD NOT BE INTERPRETED AS ANY COMMITMENT OR REPRESENTATION. THE NAMES OF ACTUAL COMPANIES AND PRODUCTS MENTIONED HEREIN MAY BE THE TRADEMARKS OF THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS.

IFS AB ©2015

IFS is a globally recognized leader in developing and delivering business software for enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise asset management (EAM) and enterprise service management (ESM). IFS brings customers in targeted sectors closer to their business, helps them be more agile and enables them to profit from change. IFS is a public company (XSTO: IFS) that was founded in 1983 and currently has over 2,700 employees. IFS supports more than 2,400 customers worldwide from local offices and through a growing ecosystem of partners. For more information about IFS, visit www.IFSWORLD.com

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ABOUT IFS

Documents

How IFS Applications 9 Delivers True Business Agility · 2016-03-28 · strategic CRM. In addition, IFS Applications 9 is complemented by our existing line of iPhone, Android and