Maximizing efficiency with IFS: Insights from Baker Tilly

If you’re a business traveler and have been on a plane or through a major airport in the United States during the last year, you’ve likely seen the growing IFS brand presence. You may have noticed the prominent use of IFS purple while watching Big Ten sports from the comfort of your living room. Perhaps those advertisements have driven you to wonder why Gartner has named IFS as a 2024 Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises. Maybe you’re wondering if your organization could benefit from IFS.

As the number 1 IFS Certified Partner in North America, Baker Tilly has seen countless conversions and implementations to IFS. Our team of Value Architects™ have the skills and the professionals to lead, drive and support your implementation at all levels. We routinely collaborate with customers to evaluate their readiness for change and development within their organizations.

I recently listened to a colleague explaining the nearly endless configuration options and methods available within the production planning modules of IFS. She talked about the ways in which material requirement planning interfaces with capability requirements planning. The discussion covered both backwards scheduling and forwards scheduling as well as how easily work center loads can be adjusted to balance production and meet customer demand. Additionally, she explained how IFS can assist in setting safety stock levels and optimizing inventory management. This ensures that you do not have excessive working capital tied up while still maintaining high levels of on-time delivery to customers.

As a finance functional consultant, I’m always in awe of the production departments within a manufacturing company. While product and business development, as well as sales and marketing, play important roles, it is the production team that ultimately drives results once a customer order is received. A state-of-the-art system, like IFS, can help put you there. However, I often think about scenarios that I’ve seen in the past where the company possesses all the necessary technology and process documentation in the world but still can’t achieve the desired results. This is frequently due to the lack of basic data inputs or the inability to capture them in a disciplined and accurate way, which is the root of the problem. It’s important to note that no enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can resolve that issue.

If I think about my Baker Tilly colleague and her breadth of knowledge on the production planning capabilities within IFS, I can’t help but recognize that that complex, modern production planning calculator within IFS relies on a stable environment within the company and on reliable inputs to churn its outputs. If I am unaware of my supplier’s or manufacturer’s lead times, if I don’t have a clear understanding of my machine or labor capacity, or if my team is not prepared for the necessary discipline, effort or change then an advanced ERP system will not drive my business to my desired result.

Will Hinshaw is an experienced manager within Baker Tilly’s Digital Solutions practice. He is an IFS certified finance functional consultant. Will leverages more than 20 years of manufacturing finance and accounting experience to provide best in class solution and process design to his clients.

If your organization is ready, so is Baker Tilly. If your organization isn’t ready, Baker Tilly remains prepared to assist. Let us help determine readiness across your organization. A commitment to a new ERP system is a major investment of money, time and people. Let our team help you maximize that investment by assuring that you’re ready to make that investment and then by supporting you to maximize it.