ABB Ability Solution Suite vs IFS Applications

• Computation of data.
• Presentation to right person.
• Ability to perform critical task and sending to users.
• Multiple control system connectivity.

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• Interfaces of IFS are very powerful and varied, making it easier to integrate the tool in your Information System. Based on standard connectors like IFS connect, you can potentially exploit formatted mail flows to avoid or reduce manual work and automate your processes (e.g. auto creation of sales contracts based on a quote), with security mechanisms inside the tool to check consistency and formatting of data before storing it in your database. Other interfaces use standard PL/SQL packages and allow you, based on web services for example, to interact with an external CRM such as Salesforce, with standard PL/SQL API packages to call web services.
• Reporting is easy with IFS and can be done in many ways : it can be either use the embedded Excel export feature. Secondly you can make use of Business Analytics feature to build complex states and feed dedicated views nightly in order not to impact your production environment while compiling and executing complex SQL statements. Thirdly, your users can make use of quick reports with a set of built-in tools, which are easy to use and learn, with no IT specialist needed, in order to be operational in an effective manner.
• IFS is based on your organization matrix to efficiently ensure the correct access to the tool, which can be done via menus etc. You can easily adapt or fine tune permissions to work at high level or on very detailed level, and control rights access management depending on your organization matrix role.

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• May be for smaller PLCs this can't be implemented.
• Cost may an area ABB can look in to.
• Improvement in GUI

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• The speed of bug fixes should be improved by the IFS after sales teams. We saw the difference of responsiveness prior to Go Live and after Go Live, with a change of teams. IFS France is working on that point, and strategically wants to innovate by acting now with two other third-party companies in early 2017, to improve the after sales experience for customers.
• There is no license model between the full licenses, which gives access to all IFS features, and the light licenses, to get access to a specific module like expense sheet. As a consequence, you must acquire a full access license for one team working only with a dedicated module (e.g. general ledger). Maybe an intermediate type license would be welcome to balance the budget. IFS tries to make prices competitive but you have to consider full upgrades of the product too, where requiring full licenses can be hard on the budget.
• When you have an Active Directory ecosystem with a trust relationship, users from domain B can't natively access IFS, even if AD sync is in place with domain A. It's important to improve that functionality because many companies have a merge and acquisition context, with SOX constraints sometimes, and avoiding maintaining contacts or local accounts simplifies SOX compliance, or to management of accounts within the company.

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• Positive is definitely ROI since manual intervention is minimized and the process is automated.
• Cost wise, ABB has been looked upon considering the small industry.
• Overall, a good solution for a large companies.

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• Reporting is now centralized and managed. Previously, reports were outside the information systems and there was a risk of incoherence.
• Accounting controls are now in place on the overall processes, including production, which helped the company to reduce closing periods or to produce more easily official mandatory accounting files yearly.
• Interfaces between the CRM forecast tool and IFS helped to keep the tools in sync, and to decrease the processing times prior to production launch.

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