Process Manufacturing, Product Estimate Management and Project Deliverables are examples of major investment areas in IFS Applications 10. Hundreds of customers have already decided to upgrade to ‘Apps 10’ to benefit from technical and functional advancements. This blog will cover reasons to upgrade to IFS Applications 10.
First, it’s important to highlight the benefits of upgrading to the latest release of any software product. For our customers, we typically find that they upgrade to maintain legal compliance, improve user satisfaction, enable new business models, futureproof technology and my favorite, eliminate modifications. So, let’s get started. Here are the top 10 reasons to upgrade to IFS Applications 10.
1. Embedded CRM
A lot of companies suffer from a disconnect between their CRM and ERP system. This means you don’t have full visibility into the quote to cash process or the lead to customer process. With the Embedded CRM solution in IFS Applications, you now have a complete view of your customers for both processes.
Another key benefit is increased mobility. Users of ERP are typically behind desktops whereas CRM users require mobile access, which requires different user interactions. Embedded CRM includes an Outlook add-in where you can create a new contact or activity without leaving your Outlook client.
2. Product Estimate Management
The idea here is to tie together Sales and Engineering for effective collaboration within engineer-to-order or configure-to-order.
Product estimate supports the bid process by providing the functionality to estimate the cost to supply a product and add markups and to add additional costs and markups to suggest the final price. This functionality helps harmonize the estimate process.
3. Warehouse Management
Our evergreen solution can continue to help improve efficiencies on your warehouse floor. We have this concept of handling units embedded throughout the entire business process. Handling units enable you to pack parts with full flexibility and traceability throughout inventory. This can be a single item or mixed lot, mixed serial and mixed part numbers as well. This enables you to perform your business activities with more speed and accuracy because you have one unique identifier (Handling Unit ID) as it flows between different business processes such as, receipt, inventory, in transit, manufacturing and shipment.
There are many ways to achieve operational excellence with IFS’s Warehouse Management solution. Below are a few:
- Configurable reservation rules. For instance, a handling cost can be minimized by reserving as few handling units as possible vs following FIFO.
- Move reservations. For instance, moving a pallet with reservations to a picking location.
- Reserve from transport task. For instance, avoid shortages because of internal movement.
- Pick by choice. For instance, save time and reduce potential inventory discrepancies, as you report back exactly what was picked.
4 & 5. Quality Management (Quality Control & Quality Assurance)
Another reason to upgrade to ‘Apps 10’ is our quality management components, which have a broad offering to help with compliance efforts. New quality management functionality offers categorical data, tools and simplified revision handling. Not only that, but audits, Non-Conformance Report (NCR) and Corrective and Preventative Action (CAPA) functionality is all available as well. What’s new in Applications 10 is how we execute these transactions with IFS Aurena. You can learn more at the 17-minute mark.
6. Process Manufacturing
There are many capabilities that have been added and improved upon in process manufacturing. There are six I would like to highlight.
1. Traceability
IFS Applications 10 offers full forward and backward traceability across sites.
2. Shelf-Life
The solution also provides consideration of future expiration.
3. Recipe/Formulas
The improvements in recipe/formulas has vastly improved based on customer feedback.
4. Re-work
There are new capabilities that manage leftovers and reject batches.
5. Batch Balancing
IFS Applications 10 offers bottom-up planning to consume the entire batch.
6. Quality Control
The solution also provides control plans and analysis including categorical data and more.
7. Demand Driven MRP (DDMRP)
DDMRP is an innovative formal planning methodology that aligns resources, working capital and supply chain planning and execution to actual demand. It has some obvious benefits. It provides a solution for relevant challenges such as demand variability and long lead-times. It helps you protect your flow and create a lean supply chain. These are things MRP doesn’t do and that can cause a lot of waste and frustration in many companies today.
IFS Applications 10 offers average daily use (ADU) visuals, lead time factor and variability factor as well as embedded push & pull visuals for visible and collaborative execution.
8. Forecasting Planning
We now offer a collaborative forecasting process overview, which I consider a great benefit to upgrading.
Also, for each forecast period, we suggest a safety stock that will change over time with seasonality. My experience is a lot of companies have safety stocks, but fail to maintain them. With IFS Applications 10, you receive an automatic adjustment with the forecast, which I think is quite useful.
9. Product Excellence
At IFS we are continuously developing upon existing functionality. We are improving existing functionality based on idea-collections from Advisory Councils, User Groups, Support and more. Your suggestions and ideas matter to us and influence the future of our products.
10. User Experience
Our new user experience, IFS Aurena, offers a consumer-centric, customizable interface that allows you to foreground the information that’s most important and work in the way that suits you best, from any device.IFS Aurena was designed with two strategic outcomes.
1. State-of-the-art user experience
2. Enabler of evergreen, integration and increased pace of innovation
IFS Aurena is built with state-of-the-art technology, running on the device you prefer, whether that’s your laptop at your desk or your mobile or tablet on the road. It’s fully customizable, so you can adapt your user experience to the way you work.
You can learn more by watching this video.
This blog was written with Jakob Björklund.
Do you have questions or comments?
We’d love to hear them so please leave us a message below.
Follow us on social media for the latest blog posts, industry and IFS news!