Download
TEC's NEW ERP Certification Report for Discrete
Manufacturing
IFS Applications 7.5
Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) recently announced
that the IFS product IFS Applications 7.5 is now TEC Certified for
online evaluation of discrete manufacturing ERP solutions in the ERP
Evaluation Center. The ERP Evaluation Center compares and evaluates
functionality based on TEC’s comprehensive model of ERP software.
The report's product highlights section focuses on ease
of use, workflow design, ease of implementation, and
innovation. Functionality benchmark
graphs and evaluations are also included in this report
for areas such as Financials, Human Resources,
Manufacturing Management, Inventory, Purchasing, Quality
Management, and Sales Management. The
following functionality benchmark graph represents the
quantity of support by IFS Applications for the
functionality within the manufacturing management
module, on a scale of 100 points. The closer the plotted
value is to 100 (toward the outside in spider graphs;
toward the top in bar charts), the more functionality
IFS Applications supports. For comparison, an average of
what competitor solutions offer is represented by the
dashed orange line.
Manufacturing Management
Manufacturing Management covers discrete
manufacturing, and provides the ability to plan
production at various scales, rolling high level plans
down into daily schedules of individual machines and
workers, and tracing real-time situations in production
shop floor and in planning to control manufacturing
(this ensures that manufacturing facilities follow
production plans in an accurate and timely manner).
It also provides the ability to change manufacturing
schedules and current operations as required. It
involves product configuring, work centers and machines
dispatching, all aspects of work-in-progress management,
& comprehensive product costing functionality. It also
provides a consolidated view of the production situation
using extensive multilevel reporting capabilities.
IFS Applications outpoints its major competitors in
the manufacturing functional area with a high overall
score of almost 97 points. This is no surprise, as
IFS is generally highly competitive in the manufacturing
industry.
Download the entire report to see how
other IFS Applications modules stack up against the
average of other solutions on the market!
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Download Free TEC ERP
for Discrete Manufacturing Report |
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Read Reliable Plant's Article About Quintessential Asset
Management
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Quintessential Asset Management:
The Road to Reliability-Centered Maintenance
Jerry Browning,
IFS North America
This Reliable Plant article outlines the
five levels of asset-management
development a company usually passes
through leading to more advanced
processes such as CBM and RCM to
eventually achieve quintessential asset
management (QAM). The five levels
include:
Level 1- Disruptive/Reactive
Level 2- Folders and Spreadsheets
Level 3- Basic CMMS
Level 4 - Integrated CMMS
Level 5- Quintessential Asset
Management
Relating to
step 2 above, notice in
this screen shot that
the graphical
representation of the
equipment structure is
hierarchical and
navigable. The equipment
records and work-order
screens are scalable.
Shown is a more mature
representation of an
equipment object with
documents attached. This
can be simplified
dramatically to only
show the fields and tabs
in use.
Read the full article
today to view more
detailed screen shots of
IFS Applications and
learn more about
quintessential asset
management today!
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Read Reliable
Plant's Full Article |
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Free White Paper: 10 Ways ERP Leans the
Manufacturing Supply Chain
There are entire books, thorough training and certification processes
all devoted to lean supply chain practices. But within any manufacturing
environment, there are a few relatively simple steps t hat
will help any enterprise lean their supply chain. In this white paper,
we will touch on these simple measures - measures that any company can
take.
Lean in a supply chain context is about a holistic view of
procurement, manufacturing distribution and sales order processing. This
means that some level of enterprise technology is necessary to view the
organization in an integrated context instead of as functional islands.
However, before technology can facilitate the lean supply chain,
manufacturing executives need to start thinking in lean supply chain
terms. This white paper reviews those terms and shares the key concepts
that are the foundation for the lean effort.
This white paper includes:
- Four tips to help bring
lean supply chain improvements to manufacturing operations.
- Six technology tools that
help automate these lean supply chain practices.
We’ll use a few practical examples along the way to illustrate these
concepts, but our main goal will be to define the specific things
manufacturing executives can do to lean their supply chain.
Read this white paper to learn more today!
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Direct Link to
Free White Paper |
Podcast: How to Achieve a Global Instance of ERP
In this month’s IFS
Radio Network podcast, global ERP is explored. Global ERP, or a single
instance of ERP where an entire bu siness
with multiple locations and divisions are supported by a single instance
of ERP on a single database, can deliver IT and business efficiencies.
What are the challenges of achieving global ERP? What are the benefits?
IFS Chief Technology
Officer Rick Veague discusses these topics and more. With a single
instance of ERP, a company may be able to reduce expenses for hardware
as well as for software licensing. But more importantly a single
instance will offer real-time and unimpeded visibility across the
enterprise, consolidate management processes that reduce non-value added
work, facilitate cooperation across geographies and reduce global
inventory levels.
There are ways to
integrate separate instances of ERP in real time, but these workarounds
present some real challenges, according to Veague:
"You can build front
end portals. You can build other types of views that span
those applications. One common way to do that is to build a
data warehouse and extract, transform and load data from
these applications into a consolidated or common view of
data… purely for visibility for reporting purposes, for
visibility and for information consolidation. And I think a
lot of businesses
that have very disparate application systems look at an
approach like that as a solution to cross-application
visibility, and it can in fact deliver that solution. But at
the same time, I caution people that I talk to that you
can’t underestimate the difficulty of building that not only
from a technical infrastructure point of view but because
you have to extract and build data from different
applications. How different applications interpret data can
be very different. And so you may have certain quantities,
part numbers and other data, but they may be in different
states. So when you get them into the data warehouse,
sometimes things don’t always make sense."
~
Rick Veague, Chief Technology Officer, IFS North America |
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Watch New IFS Customer Video
- IFS Applications Meets Diverse Needs
Watch this new 2-minute video! Kevin Bate
from Linamar, a manufacturer of precision metallic components and
systems for the automotive industry, energy and mobile industrial
markets, talks about IFS Applications and how it helps meet customer
compliances and diverse process needs.
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Watch Video Now!
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Global Study Shows ERP Can
Hinder Productivity and Business Agility
A global study carried
out by IDC on behalf of IFS reveals that less than a
third of compa nies
find their enterprise applications intuitive and easy to
use. The study examined the importance of usability and
flexibility in enterprise applications among companies
in the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Benelux,
Scandinavia and India.
Today’s global business
world is more complex and interconnected than ever,
constantly posing new challenges on productivity and
business agility. There is therefore a growing demand
among companies for enterprise applications that are
intuitive and easy to use. The survey clearly shows that
ERP providers must improve their software in order to
meet these demands.
The survey, based on
interviews with C-level respondents in seven different
industries, verified that usability and flexibility are
important considerations when evaluating enterprise
application software.
The most notable findings
were:
- Less than one third
(29%) find their enterprise applications intuitive
and easy to use
- More than half (60%)
consider some tasks a waste of time when using
enterprise applications
- Almost half (45%)
expect noteworthy business changes to take place
within the coming 12-24 months and 82% of these
respondents believe their business applications need
modification to support these changes
- 44% believe their
enterprise applications has a negative impact on
business agility
"The
study proves what we at IFS have known for many years:
usability and agility are vital for companies in terms of
productivity. IFS will therefore continue to focus on
usability and user experience as these will be areas of key
importance going forward."
~ IFS CTO Dan Matthews |
Anders Elbak, Research Manager at IDC, commented, “The
research clearly proves that while being essential for
running a company, enterprise applications are likely to
hamper productivity through unintuitive user interfaces,
poor integrations, difficult navigation and insufficient
search functionality.”
Even though a large
majority of companies (60%) considered usability when
purchasing a new system - 24% of respondents even held
it as the most important consideration - less than one
third (29%) of all respondents were running intuitive
and user-friendly enterprise applications - compared
with the
2008 IFS study on
the same topic, in which 64% of companies reported
usability as an important aspect and 42% regarded their
systems as easy to use. This suggests that expectations
about how intuitive and user-friendly ERP systems should
be have been raised in line with the general trend of
‘consumerization’ of software applications and
smartphones—a development that will prioritize usability
as a consideration for companies evaluating new systems
and as a design factor for software companies.
Learn more about how IFS
is working with
user productivity
and download the
survey here!
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Read More |
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Events: Meet IFS at
These October Events
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Upcoming Events |
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IFS Is Gold Sponsor at WCEAM/IMS - 6th Annual
World Congress on Engineering Asset Management
October 2-4, 2011 in
Cincinnati, Ohio
Meet IFS at the Sixth World
Congress on Engineering Asset Management (WCEAM) will be held in
conjunction with the National Science Foundation Industry/University
Cooperative Research Center for
Intelligent Maintenance Systems’ 10th Anniversary and 22nd Industrial
Advisory Board Meeting.
WCEAM will take place
October 2-4, 2011, followed by the IMS Center’s Industry Advisory Board
Meeting on October 5, 2011. Both events will be held at the Duke Energy
Convention Center in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio.
Tuesday,
October 4, 2011 at 1:30 p.m.
Attend the 5
Levels of Quintessential Asset Management
by IFS
Business Consultant Jerry Browning |
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IFS Sponsors 7th Annual International Maintenance
Excellence Conference (IMEC)
October 5-7, 2011 in
Toronto, Ontario
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
(1:00 p.m. – 1:50 p.m.)
Keynote Topic: How Social Media is Changing Our Behavior and
Expectations in EAM Application
Keynote Speaker: Andres Lif, IFS
Thursday, October 6, 2011
(1:45 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.)
Breakout Session: SMED: Immediate Improvement of Asset
Utilization
Speaker: Jonas Berggren, SSG Standard Solutions Group AB, and
Anders Lif, IFS
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APICS
October 23-25, 2011 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Visit IFS at Booth #406
The APICS International Conference &
Expo is one of the world's largest gatherings of
operations management professionals, and it provides
an annual interactive learning environment to share
ideas and learn from peers.
 Monday,
October 24, 2011 at 2:30 p.m.
Attend
the Brewing Up Profitable Sustainability
Management
session by
IFS Senior Advisor
William Leedale (CFPIM, CIRM, CSCP).
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Free Web-Based Tool
Simplifies CMMS/EAM Evaluation Process
Are you
looking for a CMMS or EAM solution but don't know where
to begin? Try the
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David Berger, principal of
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No other
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Free Eval
Tool |
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Meet the IFS Team
Each month the IFS customer newsletter
will feature an IFS employee.
This month's spotlight is on:
John Schuch
- Business Development Specialist
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 "I
have been working with IFS for seven months, and I work as a
business development specialist in the Chicago office.
I earned a B.S. in Political Science from the Illinois Institute
of Technology, and a M.A. in Public Administration from the
University of Northern Colorado.
The thing I
like most about working at IFS is the sensational group of
people I work with and how hard they work for our customers.
On a personal note, I have been married to Betty almost 40 years
and we have presented Marriage Encounter Weekends for 24 years.
We have five children and four grandsons. I enjoy playing golf,
reading Clancy and Lundlum novels, and cheering for the Chicago
Blackhawks hockey team." |
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The ARC Advisory Group has ranked IFS as:
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IFS DOWNLOAD CENTER
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NEW IFS VIDEO
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