Keeping Software Assets ‘Evergreen’ |

When an enterprise software vendor like IFS invests in research and development, customers benefit. This investment helps customers keep up with changing technological requirements, adopt new and emerging business processes and create value in transformational new ways.

They get net new business functionality that might enable them to retire software modifications and integrations with third party systems, eliminating cost and complexity. But how do customers keep their software assets evergreen? Increasingly, with services such as application management services (AMS).

The customers I speak to every day are keen to benefit from this constant flow of new technology. Very few of those conversations center on ‘if’ they should keep pace with their industry market – but more about ‘how’. How to overcome the hurdles around the internal bandwidth to roll it out, make it work and handle the change management with their end users.

Evergreen Software

Improved Experience

We have watched our customers adapt to the significant changes in our user interface between IFS Applications 8 and IFS Applications 10. As technology and how we use it continues to evolve, that user interface and experience is about to level up again. As a result, our customers will need to invest the time and bandwidth in optimizing this experience for their end users. Our customers are using our applications more and more on mobile devices and need to leverage our mobile design studios and other configuration options to bend the technology to their will and meet their business needs.

IFS Lobbies gives our customers unprecedented capabilities to create interactive, user-specific dashboards. They display critical information for each employee while giving them the one-click ability to act on what they see. The ability to create new and exciting custom events in the software that in turn trigger business processes or notifications is constantly evolving and expanding.

Between IFS Applications 8 and IFS Applications 10, we also completely rewrote our maintenance and service management modules. Customers rolling out those new versions will realize that standard jobs and routes are replaced with tasks and steps—a fundamental change they have a lot of questions about. Within IFS Human Resources, our customers likewise saw the addition of revamped prevailing wage and union scale functionality that in turn drive new information flows into actual costing for projects, work orders and shop orders.

A natural progression in service

We keep adding new functionality and ways for our customers to enjoy more user control. Customers can make their instance of IFS software meet their needs in ways that, with other software products, would require third party systems integration or consulting.

When people join the IFS family, they are not just buying a product. They are starting a relationship with us. We have learned that as the product grows, evolves and changes, we need to provide, within the context of this relationship, help to not just implement the product, but to really unpack its potential. This should happen in an ongoing fashion, on their schedule, according to their needs.

This heightened focus on the total lifecycle, dealing with real business situations in real time, showing a willingness to be pragmatic and collaborative, but more importantly to have a plan for the long-term based on our customers’ definition of what value is to them. This evolution into a true Customer Success model for IFS is a journey, and our first steps have led us to prioritize our customers’ experience with using our applications.

This transition to a lifecycle-based customer experience has manifested in our service and support portfolio with several outcome-based customer experiences. One that has resonated with customers, with many now using this in their daily operations is IFS Application Management Services (AMS).

Evergreen Software

Experts-as-a-Service

IFS AMS is a services and support offering from IFS designed to give our customers access to IFS experts-as-a-service. Through a flexible a la carte subscription, customers can secure on-demand access to the IFS technical, functional expertise that they need. Now, they can confidently plan and execute on business transformation initiatives, improve the customer experience, reduce order lead times, or just use IFS AMS to lighten the load on internal IT/business departments.

IFS AMS can support upgrades, manage interfaces, develop reports or role specific dashboards. No separate software orders of work or hassle—just a pre-arranged subscription pricing and delivery model. In addition to daily business and IT needs, our customers can use IFS AMS to continuously innovate and optimize their systems. We secure experts long-term with deep knowledge of IFS as well as our customers’ specific instance ready for when they are needed.

IFS is committed, from the top down, to ensuring our customers get the most out of their investment with us. It is evident in everything we do. Our customers’ experience of our technology has become ‘evergreen’. This means giving customers the option to always be on the latest version without the disruptions that come with full-scale upgrades. And, supporting these programs with services such as AMS. This provides customers greater visibility, predictability, control and flexibility in planning their own business development and adopting new capabilities from IFS.

Watch the webinar on IFS AMS to learn more and determine if this flexible service offering will help you maximize what you get back from your IFS software.