Many enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations deliver initial benefits but struggle to provide sustained, long-term value post-go-live. One solution many organizations are using to address this common industry challenge is IFS Success, a comprehensive service offering. It is designed to ensure customers continuously extract maximum value from their IFS solutions throughout the entire lifecycle. This program shifts the focus from traditional, reactive support towards a proactive, strategic partnership that boosts operational excellence and aligns the ERP system with evolving business goals from the outset.
What Does Success Look Like?
IFS Success is a holistic service built around ensuring organizations use their IFS solutions to their fullest potential. The solution achieves this through a blend of expert access and strategic partnerships:
- Expert guidance: Imagine having direct access to IFS experts – both functional and technical – who know the system inside out. Through IFS Success, users can access best-practice advice during design, help troubleshoot complex issues, and ensure optimal organizational configuration.
- Built-in operational excellence: IFS Success helps embed best practices into an organization’s daily operations, guiding it through application maintenance, process optimization, and release management like a seasoned navigator.
- Proactive optimization: This service helps organizations to continually optimize IFS solutions, aligning those solutions with evolving business needs.
- The human element: A dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) is a single contact point. This CSM manages the program, keeps the business’s success plan on track, and ensures the user’s voice is heard.
- Future-proofing the business: Beyond day-to-day operations, IFS Success looks ahead. It helps the users understand their strategic goals, identify innovation opportunities within the IFS ecosystem, and build a joint roadmap to get there.
A Use Case
Take the example of Van Oord, a European leader in complex dredging, offshore wind, and marine infrastructure projects. The company, which is implementing a new ERP across its global, project-centric organization, has leveraged IFS Success. According to Ralph Staal, Program Manager for the IFS implementation at Van Oord, IFS Success has helped the project immensely, delivering knowledge and tools for customers to realize their true business potential.
“IFS Success has really proven its worth in the past year and a half. [The] Customer Success Manager could look at some of the things we’re missing in our project and utilize IFS Success to provide that value to our project and our organization, and that came in many different forms,” he said.
Finally, the IFS Success offering acknowledges a fundamental truth: An ERP system is a living, breathing part of the organization. It needs nurturing, guidance, and strategic direction to thrive. By providing a framework for continuous value realization and partnership, IFS aims to ensure that this investment delivers on its initial promise and continues to unlock new opportunities that drive the business forward long after the go-live celebrations have ended.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Success starts before Day One. Don’t view IFS Success as something to consider after launch. Its value is immense during the implementation phase, as highlighted by the example of Van Oord’s implementation. Getting expert, best-practice guidance before you finalize configurations or migration plans can save you significant headaches and costs.
Drive continuous improvement, not just maintenance. After an ERP launches, the focus often shifts to keeping the lights on. IFS Success encourages a shift towards continuous improvement. For instance, instead of just patching issues, leverage the service to proactively explore how new IFS features can optimize a specific workflow, like inventory management or project billing, or support a new business initiative, like market expansion. This turns your ERP from a cost center into a value driver.
Align IT with strategy for real impact. The CSM and the path to innovation component are your bridges to strategic alignment. Use them. When your company sets a new strategic goal like improving customer service, work with your IFS Success CSM to identify how IFS functionalities – perhaps enhanced field service management or CRM integrations – can directly support and measure progress towards that goal. This elevates the ERP conversation from technical feeds and speeds to business outcomes.
