IFS Applications is presented by the vendor as an agile application suite that offers enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise asset management (EAM) and enterprise project management, handling 4 core processes: Service & Asset Management Full Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO) and Field Service Management (FSM) Manufacturing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with support for process manufacturing, discrete manufacturing…
Order to cash processes and scenario are implemented natively in IFS. An HR module exists for career management also (objectives, comportments, training, mobility) but may be improved in terms of workflow validation (e.g. training to validate by a manager) or reporting.
This would work well for the back side of accounting...meaning after the invoice was created. If you need software to create invoices, this may not be the software for you (or at least you would have to do additional research on its capability). Other than that, it takes care of the majority of our needs.
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.
We have been unable to get answers to our questions, solutions to our problems, and they don't seem interested in working in the construction industry.
Microsoft AX, QAD (in continuation of our previous ERP), Sage X3 was an out of the box ERP that was part of initial RFP. We have chosen IFS based on the compromise between costs & budget, functionality, technical features, and feedback from similar customers that gave their feedback. The project manager team and qualification level of technical or consultant teams were differentiating factors too. Finally IFS application was named in the Gartner’s mid-market ERP Magic Quadrant, along with SAP, and helped us to finalize our choice
Unit4 Financials is definitely much more robust than Peachtree or other software. I've also used SAP in the past and this seems to have many more capabilities.
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.
