IFS Cloud: A New Update for a New Reality

We’re excited to share the first twice-yearly update of IFS Cloud. As always, we’re constantly looking for ways to improve our products, and our teams have been hard at work collaborating with our customers and listening to the market to make improvements that will deliver the business value you need.

In this blog post, we’ll share a few highlights that will help you maximize your investment or see what we have to offer if you’re considering IFS Cloud.

Business Resilience, Accelerating Into A New Reality

We know that businesses today are facing a rapidly changing world, and that’s why this year, IFS Cloud is aimed at helping organizations like yours build resilience. Organizations across all industries want to accelerate the digitalization of their operations to achieve higher levels of productivity, agility, and excellence. Business agility is a cornerstone of business resilience in a world rife with disruptions. But resilience is more than a means of survival. It’s about enabling you to create a durable foundation that allows your organization to thrive and grow in this unique environment. IFS allows organizations to be agile and adaptive, respond quickly and effectively in a sustainable way to changing conditions, mitigate risk to protect their business, and accelerate into the next phase of growth.

This upcoming update includes tools, innovations, and experiences designed to help your organization build resilience while accelerating in the new reality by optimizing people, assets, and services, connecting global operations, and achieving ESG goals profitably.

Optimizing People, Assets and Services

We always strive to help organizations overcome challenges and achieve their goals. Against a backdrop of disruption, managing and fine-tuning core priorities is crucial. That’s why IFS Cloud leverages automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to optimize processes and decisions across people, assets, and services. This empowers organizations like yours to achieve growth, deliver successful outcomes, and pivot quickly as needs arise. To help you optimize your people, assets, and services, the upcoming update will assist to:

Improve manufacturing throughput and quality through intelligent automation with manufacturing updates in ERP. The latest updates help your teams benefit from easier integration for master data with a third-party Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and reduce production costs through improved support for automated production reporting in production schedules. Increase quality control to ensure successful outcomes.

Empower your product planners with new scheduling scenario functionality. IFS Cloud Manufacturing Scheduling & Optimization offers new scheduling scenario functionality, which enables your product planners to create more realistic schedules and better meet customer demand. Optimize your resources and reduce work in progress and inventory levels to maximize production output.

Increase first-time-fix on jobs requiring service crews. With the latest updates to Service Management in IFS Cloud, your crew resources are now part of task and shift planning, with scheduling optimization that now supports your crews with individual and team resource types and skills for service delivery. This improvement ensures that your crews can respond to customer needs more quickly and efficiently.

Improve compliance and balance asset uptime with maintenance needs. With our Enterprise Asset Management updates to IFS Cloud, your organization gains greater control over maintenance planning and helps meet regulatory expectations. Your teams can now align maintenance and operational plans combining both data sets into a unified scheduling experience. This unification minimizes downtime impact in operational environments by allowing your planners to optimize resources by identifying deviations or unplanned activities and incorporating new ones for maintenance intervention.

Anticipate and prepare for aviation maintenance needs. With Fleet Planner updates, your strategic planners can model multiple parallel “What-if Scenarios” of fleet operational data and business rules without impacting other plans. This modeling enables your organization to minimize risk, maximize resources, and improve safety and efficiency.

Connect Global Operations

At IFS, we understand the importance of breaking down silos within organizations to increase resilience, agility, and responsiveness to global challenges. That’s why our latest update of IFS Cloud continues to help connect operations across departments, sites, and assets to identify and address risks and opportunities. We aim to equip your teams with capabilities that reduce complexity, increase consistency, and ultimately allow you to serve your customers faster while meeting compliance requirements. In this next section, we’ll share a snapshot of our efforts to connect siloed operations in support of business resilience.

Increase user productivity for customer returns. Take advantage of the latest supply chain ability to employ a standard inbound process for customer returns and an outbound shipping process integrated across all relevant functions.

Enhance the end customers’ experience for service delivery. Through a technician tracking capability in Service Management, your customers will be able to view, track, and amend service appointments. They can see the planned time, technician name, scope of work, and technician location on a map in near real-time.

Reduce asset relocation administration overhead. The process of moving serial assets between sites is improved to be further streamlined in the latest EAM update. This process improvement will help to reduce the administrative effort for maintenance or asset managers, procurement specialists, logistics teams, and maintenance planners through the cycle of asset removal from the current location to transportation and installation at a new location.

Achieve Your ESG Goals, Profitably

Achieving long-term value requires a strong environmental, social, and governance (ESG) position, but in volatile market conditions, it is crucial to set ESG goals and financial profitability targets in the right way to accomplish both rather than one at the expense of the other. IFS provides organizations with data to show progress against commitments, ensuring accountability and transparency while identifying opportunities to reduce costs and increase revenue through sustainable efforts. Staying committed to ESG goals enables your business to positively impact the planet while remaining profitable. Keep reading to see a few updates to help you profitably support your ESG goals.

Increase the velocity and volume of repair vs. replace analysis: To facilitate data-driven investment decisions, your teams can take advantage of the new asset insights feature in EAM. Gain rapid insights into the comparative health of critical assets allowing for better maintenance practices and, by association, reduced material waste and travel. The ability to visualize trend information will reduce the time to repair or replace assets.

Reduce emissions from missed service calls. IFS Service Management in IFS Cloud offers last-mile technical tracking capability to support your ESG goals. Improve customer service in advance of service calls. Let your customers view, track, and amend their appointment details to prevent aborted service calls. Why not increase customer satisfaction and positively impact the environment at the same time?

Support sustainable and circular manufacturing operations. IFS support for circular manufacturing operations includes an Eco footprint capability that now supports new regulatory reporting requirements. It helps the adoption of circular business models and supports manufacturing disassembly for component reuse, reducing production costs and improving compliance reporting.

With IFS Cloud, you can continue to manage your core priorities, even in the face of everyday challenges and constraints.

For our existing customers, upgrading to IFS Cloud will provide access to even more advanced capabilities that can further enhance your ability to accelerate into the new reality we are all living through while staying resilient.

And for those reading this blog to see what we have to offer your organization, I think you’ll agree that IFS Cloud represents a smart investment in the future of your business, enabling you to meet the demands of your industry in an ever-changing world.

Take your next step towards a brighter future. Hear more about how the latest update can help you and hear from IFS customers enjoying the benefits of IFS Cloud at our IFS Connect events.

If you can’t make it to a Connect event, read more about what we have to offer in the upcoming update in our What’s New Factsheet.