It’s a green and beautiful summer day in London, and ERP Today is interviewing Mark Moffat as he reaches his nine-month anniversary as chief executive officer of IFS. When we last profiled an IFS CEO for a cover story feature, the headline was “The Moment of Service”. The cover line, meanwhile, was “Rockstar Service”. It won’t take a genius to work out the messaging, and, indeed, IFS in recent years has become as synonymous with its cloud vendor transition as it is for its service management memo to the market.
The Moment of Service tagline – co-opted, not coined by ERP Today, we hasten to point out – also became interchangeable with the tenure of previous CEO and aforementioned cover star Darren Roos, who today operates as IFS chairman. As Roos stepped down from the top role, up stepped Mark Moffat, previously chief customer officer for the vendor, in a move that made sense to all industry insiders. Moffat had struck watchers like myself as a confident and popular leader over the last few years, regularly sharing the room in analyst and journalist meetings with Darren. The transition between the pair was a smooth and respectful one, meaning as I meet Moffat in London Town, the real detail to unpick is the transition of IFS itself so far in 2024.
Like any new CEO, Moffat will want to make his mark, especially in this so-called age of AI that is defining the decade. Likewise, there needs to be clear continuity under his tenure, especially from the customer perspective. This means the Moment of Service arguably should remain the mantra, no matter what technological changes are happening in the market.
Moffat agrees, noting that on the artificial intelligence front, he sees the Moment of Service as including an “obligation and responsibility to make sure we play a part in enabling our customers’ AI journey.”
Tellingly, the CEO sees the “IFS Moment” as ensuring one puts themselves in the customer’s shoes. Thus, as a continuation of sorts from his previous role as CCO, Moffat took on the challenge this year to meet 100 customers in his first 100 days – this time as chief exec.
The final tally ended up being more than double, and Moffat tells ERP Today the exercise honed his C-suite narrative on IFS becoming more of a “listening organization”.
“The value of listening sharpened through the exercise. It allowed me to remind everyone what we are about as an organization: we’re high touch, and customer-obsessed in our nature.”
Moffat takes pride in some of the customer stories he shares, such as “a highly acquisitive” food manufacturing enterprise who see IFS as “being a part of their value creation story for their investors [due to] our highly composable architecture and Cloud offering in our single data model.”
The customer story as Mark sees it is one full of transformation, ranging across back office operations and how clients develop offerings to their own customers. Unsurprisingly, the exec wants that story to stay the same as IFS grows under his watch:
“What I talk a lot about internally is we can never lose a sense of who we are. And it doesn’t matter whether we’re six, seven, eight, nine, ten billion in revenue – we are fiercely determined to protect our cultural DNA.”
Inside IFS interconnections
Crucial to this narrative are partnerships. On his 100-day customer journey as new CEO, Moffat says he was reminded of the criticality of the 500-plus-strong IFS partner ecosystem, which he describes as “highly engaged” and “desperate to innovate around our platform”
“I know we’re different and you know why?” he continues. “Because I spent 24 years implementing all of our competitors’ technology […] So I’m actually a bit unique in that respect; no other CEO in my peer group can tell you they’ve implemented the range of vendor competitive technology that I have [over] hundreds of implementations. So I speak with confidence knowing why I think we’re different in certain attributes.
“And on the partner ecosystem, the way we work with our partners is also different – we get them access to all of our tools. If we develop things for ourselves, we make it as available as quickly as we can to our partners […] They’re treated as part of our community.”
One partner in the ecosystem is PwC, Moffat’s “home” prior to IFS. His last role at the consultancy was as CTO for UK & EMEA, built upon a background with PwC’s energy customers, setting him up rather nicely for the asset-heavy clientele of IFS.
While Moffat mentions an “affection” for PwC, he doesn’t necessarily want them viewed differently to others in the IFS orbit. This “all are equal” approach follows a similar line taken by Darren Roos, even on higher profile partners such as Arcwide, the joint venture of BearingPoint and IFS which formed in 2022.
I’m unique – no other CEO in my peer group has worked as I have on implementations
That said, Moffat does go as far as to note that like other global consulting firms, PwC offers multinational clients a more direct capability – fitting for the UK-headquartered vendor’s increasingly global mindset.
The reach of a Big Four player saw a twenty-something Moffat exposed to some of the biggest companies in the world, the kind of experience, he says, “even today I think is unrivaled.”
While most CEOs have a typical background – and most CEO interviews follow a typical pattern – Moffat shares some rather atypical information about his history prior to his consultancy days.
I learn that Mark grew up in a rural Scottish town with “more sheep than people”. His working-class background meant he worked for “every luxury in life” from 13 onwards, taking his first job in a hotel kitchen. By 17 he was a fully-trained chef, entirely self-funded, and running said hotel as assistant manager by the time he turned 20.
He remembers the chaos of the kitchen well, saying it set him in good stead for life: “You don’t get more intense than that!” he recalls. “And I think working in that intensity and making prioritization, trade-off decisions in the kitchen environment, the broader hotel environment or customer service are so important.”
After these formative years in hospitality, Moffat was attracted to further education, specifically chartered accountant training, paying out of his own pocket once more. Thus was set his path to the doors of ol’ PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“I had to graft and find a way through to being accepted into PwC. I was told by a number of people that my grades weren’t good enough. That the school I went to wasn’t good enough. The university wasn’t ‘high caliber’ enough to get training at PwC or a Big Four firm. And my attitude honestly was, ‘screw you’. I just did it through hard work, determination and application of effort and became a chartered accountant in PwC.”
Listening to Mark, the link between hospitality manager, chartered accountant and technology CEO makes perfect sense. “At the end of the day,” as he explains, “finance and numbers, that’s a big part of what makes the world go around. Technology is another part. So you put a career in finance and technology together, [and] you can do anything.”
IFS and Industrial AI
Moffat’s career choice was a shrewd move, and today he holds his first-ever CEO role. What can top that? But as we talk, I realize Mark loves a challenge and rising in the face of adversity; he’s a keen runner, for example, often taking part in famously arduous Ironman Triathlons.
Halfway through our conversation, I’m therefore tempted to ask the exec if he now misses the chance to say ‘Screw you’ to the doubters. After all, there’s nothing to achieve now he’s sitting in the big chair, right? Not a chance, as Mark quickly points out IFS’s journey to ERP superiority is not yet over.
“We’re a $1.5bn dollar revenue company or thereabouts. And that needs to be five, six, seven, eight billion. The size of the market is that big. Our opportunity is even bigger, and we’re just getting started.”
That’s serious fighting talk, and it comes from a place of confidence in the next step for IFS dominion: as of 2024, the vendor is betting big on AI, with Mark the company’s figurehead in this age of GenAI. Where Darren Roos brought IFS into the cloud age for the “Moment of Service”, the very determined Moffat seems poised to build on the cloud for its next-stage eventuality of enterprise AI. Another sign then, if needed, that ERP, EAM and AI are coming together, with IFS’s customer base of asset-heavy industries not immune from the technology theme.
We are fiercely determined to protect our cultural DNA
The name of the game, to be precise, is Industrial AI, with the service management “moment” augmented by an AI-based scheduling and optimization engine.
“It’s market-leading because customers tell us it’s market leading, and we’re winning significant numbers of market share,” says Moffat proudly, before highlighting that GenAI is just one aspect of the IFS Industrial AI offering. Just as relevant – if not more so – to his customer base, he says, are capabilities in anomaly detection and forecasting, with optimization opportunities available for plant and capital-intensive sites.
The CEO is also keen to note that, as is widely known, the return on AI investment remains a giant question mark. For his customers, Moffat is keen to stress that IFS is “relentlessly focused” on ensuring any AI-centric capability in their products is based on what customers want and which will drive real return.
“We will have 100 unique AI capabilities in our software in the 2025 R1 release; ‘24 R2 will have 50 […] and we’re making sure that of the 50, then the 100, that they’re not just use cases but they’re being adopted at scale by our customer base.”
With its single data model, he believes, the IFS Cloud solution is in a good position to capture all the heavy data from asset-heavy orgs: from pressure gauges, temperature and other sensors, collected across wind turbines and more. Said data can be aggregated with use cases applied to it, accentuating a “super compelling” ability to create long-term innovation cycles in AI.
This can extend into the field service management (FSM) offering, with Moffat giving the example of a van technician being able to put together equipment as recommended by an AI-based forecast, before setting off on a dynamically scheduled route to meet their customer.
“So there’s a high probability that they turn up with the right equipment, on time, with the ability to get that customer going with whatever the problem is, all in record time.”
Recent acquisitions have furthered the FSM and AI portfolio under Mark’s watch; he mentions this summer’s purchase of aviation maintenance software player EmpowerMX, saying it has extended the IFS AI capability to improve uptime, reduce maintenance times and increase ROI in maintenance repair and overhaul for commercial aviation. Customers include some of the world’s largest carriers, such as American Airlines and Delta.
Industrial and Financial Sustainability
While Moffat sees all these recent acquisitions as extending the company’s AI reach, he interestingly gives a new slant on the most recent incorporation, that of decision analytics firm Copperleaf Technologies. The day of our interview marked the completion of the CAN$1bn deal, with the exec laying out the purchase as an integral part of not just its asset lifecycle management story but also the IFS ESG roadmap, as led by one of the various new names appointed to his C-suite this year, chief sustainability officer Sophie Graham. Another name is Bianca Nobilo, chief external affairs officer as appointed by Moffat and Roos to lead relations between bodies such as those of government and industry.
Nobilo tells ERP Today there is government interest in ways to spur energy-efficient productivity to increase output alongside delivering on sustainability goals and aligning with new regulations. She notes that asset-heavy industries are actively seeking ways to reduce their carbon footprint and invest in energy efficiency, with IFS garnering interest in this regard.
“I think the potential applications for Copperleaf’s capital allocation planning for local and national governments and public services are potent,” Nobilo adds when discussing Copperleaf Technologies. “Optimizing the allocation of significant capital to serve myriad priorities, over different time scales, is exactly what Copperleaf specializes in.”
Underlining the decision analytic capabilities of Copperleaf, Moffat draws a through line on how they can help customers think through trade-off choices on capital deployment and investment cycles.
“So they can deploy capital into carbon-intensive or less carbon-intensive in relation to their goals. So Copperleaf is really going to help that ESG agenda.”
With IFS’s prominent footstep in the asset-heavy and carbon-heavy sector, it seems the Copperleaf Technologies addition is one of three dimensions: a further step in the aggressive global plans from the vendor, an extra string to its AI strategy, and an extra leaf to IFS’s green-fingered ambitions which may have been lost in all the AI talk.
“We’re really proud of our achievements in sustainability [and] guiding product roadmaps with our research and development organizations, so we’re extending that reach into the customer domain,” as Moffat elaborates.
“I think that’s a super exciting place for us to be so that we disproportionately influence what’s happening in the market.”
One IFS customer, leading packaging provider Cheer Pack North America, confirms with ERP Today on some of the above. Alex Ivkovic, chief information officer for the company, says they are letting IFS lead the way on AI with confidence, having been a client for almost two decades. Having upgraded to the latest version of IFS Cloud, Cheer Pack is currently looking at its ESG reporting element.
“We sell an inherently environmentally-friendly product and really want to use the manufacturing data to bolster our case,” Ivkovic says. “We are planning to learn more at this year’s IFS Unleashed conference and then create a plan to move this forward.”
IFS in flight
So, onto the future then: IFS Unleashed, for one, is coming up in October, with Orlando, USA once again hosting the vendor’s flagship conference. After that are those promised AI elements to IFS Cloud’s 2025 iterations – and the next steps in Mark Moffat’s masterplan.
I learn the company will continue focusing on the same industries, and acquisitions will remain complementary and valuable to customers in however they extend the IFS prospect. “We don’t just chase growth – we chase highly additive, accretive, customer-focused capabilities and solutions,” in Mark’s own words.
Expect also for IFS to keep what Moffat terms a nimble, start-up kind of mentality that doesn’t forsake existing clients.
A large number of big vendors today have lost touch with who they are
“You’re as good as the last project you delivered. And you trade off a track record of delivery and building trust and integrity in the relationships you develop with customers. And if you build the trust and you build a relationship and you build a track record, guess what? Customers want to buy from you again because you’ve got a reputation for delivering.
“A large number of big enterprise application vendors today have lost touch with who they are, and lost touch with customer sentiment,” Moffat concludes without naming names. “So there’s a number of things that I’ve been doing personally, to make sure that we don’t do that and I lead by example.”
In other words, Mark Moffat is the chief executive officer of a rare sort: one who’s made his mark with customers and is intent on making his mark as CEO without forgetting what made his name originally. As a result, IFS is in a good place to help its customers make their own mark in an AI-focused, increasingly ESG-centered world – and any adversities are highly unlikely to leave any kind of mark on its machine.
