IFS: The Future of Field Service Management

IFS: The Future of Field Service Management

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Darren Roos, CEO, IFSDarren Roos, CEO “There never were in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity.”—Michel de Montaigne, one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance.

The same way, no one ever reached the top by doing things the same way as others. Especially when it comes to businesses, uniqueness is the real competitive advantage. Those who took a chance, challenged the norms and tried new ideas and techniques, are the ones who have the highest probability to win. Filed service management is one such industry vertical where most businesses are trying out innovative techniques and solutions for successful business operations. However, these businesses making diversity in their offerings need support from a company who shares a passion for doing things differently and who focuses to be an enabler for its customer’s successful operations. “That is the value proposition of IFS—a company on a mission to partner with its customers to realize their competitive advantage now, and into the future and align with them in every point of their successful field service operations,” begins Darren Roos, CEO, IFS. Roos is a proven enterprise software leader, with a track record of establishing and scaling global software businesses. Under the captainship of Roos, the IFS team focuses on helping customers leverage the right enterprise solution and leverages in-depth industry expertise to support businesses that want to work in a smarter way.

"A company on a mission to partner with its customers to realize their competitive advantage now, and into the future"

IFS develops and provides agile, component-based software for enterprise resource planning (ERP), field service management (FSM) and enterprise asset management (EAM). The industry expertise of IFS, together with the commitment to customer success has made the company a recognized leader and one of the most recommended FSM, ERP and EAM suppliers in the industry. Moreover, with user-friendly design, full mobile user support, IFS is widely accepted by leading businesses across the globe.

Redefining Filed Service Management

IFS develops and delivers enterprise software for businesses across the globe that manufacture and distribute goods, maintain assets, and manage service-focused operations. Available worldwide, the company’s user-friendly enterprise application software lets businesses align with the changing technology and enables them to stay one step ahead of their competitors. IFS’s portfolio of solutions ranges from service management, and supply chain management to customer engagement and enterprise project management.
Designed for deployment as a SaaS solution, in the IFS Managed Cloud or on-premise, IFS FSM redefines configurability for cloud-based field service, delivering customers the freedom to customize data fields, interfaces, and workflows to their unique field service environment. While virtually eliminating the need for expensive customizations, the new IFS FSM’s latest versions make it easy to optimize user behavior while remaining on a standard upgrade track that enables seamless access to the latest feature enhancements. The company extends its field service offering with the latest version of filed management solution—Field Service Management 6. With a variety of significant improvements and new capabilities, the new FSM 6 has been field tested and is delivering value for early adopter customers including Eickhoff, a market leader in technology and services for mining and gearbox applications.

IFS’ mobile field service software offers a complete feature-rich toolkit especially for field engineers, enabling the field staffs to complete every complicated work from mobile devices

IFS FSM 6 covers the entire, end-to-end service lifecycle of a business’s field operations. The solution’s improved and embedded IoT capabilities make it best-in-class, offering the most complete and seamlessly connected field service in the market today. With its new solution, the company is clearly focused on helping organizations maximize operational efficiency, increase revenue while improving customer satisfaction.

IFS’s extended offering for service management, which includes the WorkWave suite of solutions, comes with an array of capabilities that is unmatched in the market while making IFS uniquely able to address the entire market from SMEs to global enterprises. The new version empowers users with most advanced and extended features such as enhanced capabilities for reverse logistics, spare parts management, and depot repair, and increased flexibility for workforce scheduling optimization. Better functionality for warranty, contracts, and pricing management enable entirely new business models for companies that deliver services primarily through distributors.

The company’s mobile field service software offers a complete feature-rich toolkit especially for field engineers, enabling the field staffs to complete every complicated work from mobile devices—whether locating replacement parts, raising invoices for new jobs, or providing customer quotes on site.

That’s not all; the new IFS FSM 6 brings to market major extensions of its out-of-the-box functionality with more buying and deployment choice in the cloud, even greater mobile field service and back-office capabilities, and intuitive new user experience on any browser or device.

Mobility at the Fingertip

Harnessing the potential of IFS, businesses can automate their field service processes with powerful, native mobile apps for Android, iOS and Windows devices.
With its configurable, secure mobility platform, field workforce can quickly accept jobs, use GPS to find nearby parts and get accurate directions, order parts, enter labor-related expenses, take pictures, fill-out checklists and capture signatures. The solution comes with the convenience of both online and offline operations on any device such as the smartphone, tablet or even a laptop. Furthermore, IFS proprietary mobile synchronization technology works in the cloud, underground, or onsite. With the right information at their fingertips, the empowered field workforce will dramatically improve productivity, first-time fix rates, on-time SLA performance, and customer satisfaction.

Eliminating the Whirrs of Legacy

Today, the company’s team of 3,500 employees supports more than one million users worldwide from a network of local offices and via a growing partner ecosystem. The company SAAB, a Swedish aerospace, and defense company, replaced over 100 legacy systems with IFS Applications. IFS ERP systems support the first British metal mine for 45 years using IFS applications. Sinopacific Shipbuilding Group, the world’s largest offshore vessel builder, uses IFS Field Service Management applications while auto windscreen reduced its internal support calls by 75 percent.

With a vision for the future of field service, Ainsworth, an integrated, multi-trade company providing quality electrical, HVAC, building automation, data, and maintenance services, sought a system that would deliver value to its customers and offer seamless data analysis. With FSM, Ainsworth streamlines processes, increases efficiencies, enhances customer service, and continues to grow rapidly. Using IFS FSM, Ainsworth can send work orders directly to technicians, with immediate access capability. The use of mobile functionalities also enables the Ainsworth technicians to obtain purchase orders, add attachments, quote and look up service history for equipment or job sites from the field itself. Ainsworth utilizes the configurability of IFS FSM to allow its technicians to collect information even without any unnecessary shuffling of screens. Moreover, implementing IFS FSM facilitated many beneficial back office changes for Ainsworth soon.

The impactful integration to the ERP enables for more streamlined and automated processes on the back end of the billing process. As a result, Ainsworth significantly reduced the lead time between work order closure and invoice distribution to its clients, thus dramatically reducing manual labor and the billing cycle time.

IFS FSM holds a variety of functionality in it. When customers require special reports, dispatchers no more have to worry about manually pulling and formatting data into a spreadsheet. With IFS FSM, special reports are created with just the click of a button. Businesses such as Ainsworth are able to leverage the solution’s functionality to deliver information to customers in a timely manner.

Today, the company has over 10 percent of revenue invested in R&D, where the IFS Lab explores new concepts and market trends. The company’s agile software and global reach help its customers and embrace what’s next with confidence, so they’re not just ready for tomorrow, but are able to make innovation happen.
- Vishnu Santhosh
    April 08, 2019