IFS: Challenging the Change

‘Agility in businesses’ is one of the most crucial factors that define the prospective layout for any entity in the corporate. Be it the unpredictability of commodity prices or the changing regulation of the market, being agile and adaptable to all challenges while capitalizing the transformation is what makes an organization dynamic in true sense. This is where IFS steps in. Founded in 1983, IFS is a global leader in developing and delivering enterprise software for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM). The company offers applications that enable organizations to respond quickly to market changes and use resources in a more agile way to achieve scalable business performance and competitive advantages.

Today, IFS solutions are used by over thousands of customers worldwide through a network of local offices and a growing ecosystem of partners. With IFS Applications and powerful service management and mobile functionality, IFS has pioneered component-based service management and ERP software. IFS Enterprise Service Management in the meantime is a leader in field service management, mobile workforce management, reverse logistics and more. The company’s business philosophy and architecture provides solutions that are easier to implement, run, and upgrade. IFS Applications business software provides increased ERP functionality, including CRM, SCM, PLM, EOI, enterprise asset management, and MRO capabilities. IFS’s products are known for being user-friendly, modular in their design and flexible enough to support the customers in their way of working according to their established processes. The products are built to help the customer capitalize on change, bringing them closer to their business, with quick visibility into what is happening at any moment in time. These products embed real operational flexibility into the heart of the customer’s organization, with technology that enables their strategic growth rather than hindering it.

Enterprise software is unquestionably one of the most important asset investments made by a business. Along with being robust and cost-effective, it should also be able to generate returns throughout its lifecycle. On top of this, the product should be capable of being upgraded, added, and replaced with minimal downtime and impact on operations. IFS constantly strives to meet these criteria through its IFS Applications.

IFS Applications is a single, integrated application suite that enables global and demanding businesses to successfully handle four core processes: Service & Asset Management, Manufacturing, Projects, and Supply Chain Management. Over the past 30 years, the company has heavily invested its industry experience and expertise in creating robust designs that accommodate future change. As a part of this strategy, IFS has encapsulated and isolated architecture layers and platform components that might later become subject to change. The company also supports leading commercial and open source products allowing organizations to easily change the environments in which IFS Application operates.

The adaptability factor of the product helps in the cost reduction of ownership over the long term. The company’s commitment towards standard technologies and solutions has a long term foresight of upgrading and replacing technologies without causing ripple effects across the solutions. This allows the company to cut start-up time and training costs or system integrators, developers and technicians.

IFS has a very pragmatic and customer-centric approach towards the solutions it designs and develops. The company builds a strong understanding of customers’ businesses work fueled by its curiosity about how they use enterprise software in their daily work. The company focuses to gain insights over its customer’s businesses through listening, running business advisory seminars and policy-making groups conducted during each project in order to form a close collaboration with its customers. This approach has enabled IFS to create an impressive array of knowledge about many different industries, which has helped the company in developing suitable customer specific enterprise software solutions. This information has not only helped IFS to cultivate a future-scope line of solutions but has also helped it in identifying common obstacles and catalysts of change that exist in the market. For IFS, a particularly active element is its advisory council, where the customers convey their views and insights in regular meetings with IFS decision makers. This is complemented by user groups worldwide, where customers meet to discuss and tell the company what they as a collective need to improve their use of the IFS products.

To become the best in its field, IFS has set up a benchmark of a prominent enabler in its market exceeding the expectations of its clients and setting an example for its industry peers and competitors. Professionals from some of the world’s largest analyst companies have recognized IFS’s development for many years. The company has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Single-Instance ERP for Product-Centric Midmarket Companies, published November 2014 and Field Service Management, published December 2014. According to ARC report, IFS has constantly strengthened its offering and its market position through acquisitions and an extensive network of partners. Today, IFS stands as one of the global leaders in enterprise software and a growing company with ambitions to continue to acquire companies and work closer with renowned partners such as NEC and Accenture. With such trajectory the prospects of the company looks brighter than ever before.