Service CollABorative April 2024 Session

IFS Service CollABorative: Tech Talk Session with Stephen Jeffs-Watts, SVP Service Applications at IFS

Date of Meeting: 17 April 2024 10:00 AM US Eastern Standard Time

Stephen Jeffs-Watts Presentation:

Slide: Service Management Collaborative Product Update

• I'm Stephen Jeffs-Watts based out of the UK, I'm the head of the service applications group in R&D. I've been at IFS for the best part of 18 years and leading the service management part of our R&D since March 2020. Before that I was the product manager for this area, both the product manager for FSM and for the service capability in what was IFS applications at the time. And I did that for about 3-4 years before taking over the whole thing. I’m accountable for everything that we're doing at the moment in service, but I'm certainly not the person that's doing it all. By the end of this year, we'll be close on 300 people in my group. That's 300 people that are focused just on service management features and functions. The capability that your end users will touch in the application, regardless of the considerable investment that goes into the platform and into the UX. So, we're a much, much, much more scalable, and bigger organization in R&D than we were and hopefully that's been borne out by the rate of new capability that's coming through into IFS Cloud.

Slide: A new home for IFS

• Effectively what we've been working on up to now with IFS cloud is really trying to create a new home or consolidating all of IFS's service management capability. And that the initial focus that we're working on I'm going to say fourfold.
• Firstly, it's to make PSO and native part of IFS cloud to make sure that all of the capability that has been available in that standalone scheduling engine is exposed in the core solution and in IFS Cloud.
• The next thing that we're doing is looking at the creation if you like, of a new service solution, that takes the best bits of IFS applications, the best bits of FSM, the best bits of Astea Alliance, the best bits of Astea FX, which was a very small product that came in as part of the Astea acquisition in 2019-2020. And to put that capability into IFS Cloud in a way that gives us the leading service management platform. That's the initial scope and the work that my team are doing.
• In parallel to that, we've got some work going on in CE, and the capability from CE, specifically around portals and engagement technology and that kind of stuff you'll start to see manifest itself in IFS Cloud natively over the next couple of years. And when we've done all of that stuff, then we'll start looking at Clevest and the utilities, mobile workforce management solution as well, which will give all of you some very strong opportunities to expand the way that you use IFS Cloud in the real world. So that's what we're sat working on as it were right now.

Slide: IFS Cloud Service Management capability & Solutions

• The end goal is that as a an organization, we're able to offer 4 main go to market solution areas with IFS Cloud. And for everyone that's been using FSM or Alliance, that really revolves around the SLM core, coupled with depot repair in a number of cases, coupled with the workforce management solution. That's really the footprint. But what we want to do at the same time, acknowledging that Clevest is coming, acknowledging that some organizations, when you first contracted with IFS, you were really implementing what you call the FSM solution, which in reality is really what I would term a workforce management solution. It's all about working gestation, resource management, scheduling and work execution, without some of the SLM capability that you're now implementing around contract management, install base and products warranties, all of those kind of things.
• So, what we want to be able to do with IFS Cloud and what we'll start to really be able to do properly over the course of the next year is be able to offer that standalone thinner, lighter footprint of workforce management, broadening out into service lifecycle management, adding on to that depot repair in the right circumstances, coupled with really strong customer service technology and capability. And if we can offer those four main kind of pillars of solution, then in the right way, we will have a very flexible service management platform that's available to all of you, to work in the right way for your business, and your scenarios.

Slide: The journey to IFS Cloud – progress in every release

• Now, the way that we've been going about that is to build out this core. And we delivered a hell of a lot in 2021. We delivered even more in 2022.

Slide: The journey to IFS Cloud – progress in every release (Confidential)

• We delivered even more than that in 2023, and 2024 is coming up or 24R1 is coming out in in less than a month and that has got even more capability added to it. Now that's got a load of list of features which is really hard to read and I'm pretty sure people only create slides like this just to say hey, how good a we? And that's really not the intent here, because what I want to do is just try and unpack that a little bit into what the objectives have been since we started.

Slide: The journey to IFS Cloud – progress in every release (Confidential)

• Because in reality during 2021 and the first half of 2022, it was all about as building the new core out. Building a new core into the application and making that available. Then during 2022 and the first half of 2023, it was about adding breath to that core. Adding in new install based capability, adding in new recurring service, adding in new warranty around that core of the application, around the request and task management and resource management and mobile. Next up, it's then been adding depth. So build a core, make that core bigger, then add depth in workforce management and work execution. And that's been the focus probably since the latter stages of the 23R1 release, certainly into the 23R2 release and definitely into the 24R1 release. And we're getting towards a point where that depth is getting really strong now, and by the 24R2 release, I'd say it is deep. And it will be very, very deep. Significantly better, I would like to say than what was available in that area in FSM. And we'll be really exploiting a lot of the capability that the PSO brings to the solution, to make sure that we can have the most optimized service scenarios and support in the industry. And then now as we go through the second half of 24 and through into 2025, it's then there's adding depth in the core SLM area, so that will be depth into contract, depth into warranty, depth into pricing, and all of those kind of efforts. Whilst we then kick off some additional investments that I will come on to shortly. But from a customer perspective, it effectively means that new customer implementations that typically take a while to go live, started at the start of 2022. And the good news I would say, is that for all of our customers on FSM and on Alliance that are running outbound based service operations, so field operations, you can from 23R2 onwards in reality, but let's say definitely for 24R1, you can start saying I really want to have a proper look at IFS Cloud because the capability will be there or thereabout. Because if it's not quite there yet, it will be by the time that you've gone through your migration project. Because it will be released in 24R2, it'll be released in 25R1 and we've got a very clear path now to what that looks like and what it means. In fact, our services team are now standing up a migration or an upgrade assessment tool where they can sit with you and they can review your configurations. We've produced some tooling to help you analyze the configurations you've made in FSM. Analyze the capability you're using and then turn around and say, OK, fine, is everything in IFS Cloud that you're going to need today? And if it's not today, then we've got open lines of engagement with that services team to then start saying, OK, is this coming 24R2? Is this coming 25R1 and really help plot out that path to IFS Cloud for all of our customers. So a significant change from when I last spoke to you.
• So that's kind of where we are and I'm really proud of the team and what they've achieved so far. Just to give you an idea of scale now in terms of the number of implementations ongoing, I'd say the number of live customers is still, a little bit lower than I would like. In reality, there are all sorts of different reasons for that, that vary by customer, so I won't go into that, but if we look at the number of live implementations of the IFS Cloud Service Management solution today, there are over 60 around the world.  Now bearing in mind there are 92 FSM customers in total, then these aren't 60 customers migrating from FSM across 60 of the 92. But we're already at the point where within the course of this year, we should have 2/3 of the customer base that were on FSM in terms of number of customers that are running in their service operations on IFS Cloud. And part of that's been a deliberate strategy to work with new customer implementations first, because you guys know that when you go live, you go live in one way and your business evolves and you're usage of the product gets more and more complicated, with the amount of configuration you do in the product gets greater, as each year progresses and quite frankly, we didn't necessarily have the depth that we needed in those areas to enable customers to do that. So, a new implementation typically takes a longer period of time. That gives us time to accelerate things if we need to accelerate things, to rethink things if we've got them wrong because we're not going to get everything right 100% first time. But also now, we're at a point where during the course of this year, a significant number of customers will be hitting that “I'm live” button and going live successfully. In fact, I was involved in one right at the back end of last year, which was a pleasure. In the end, it probably took a little bit longer than we wanted to get them there, but they are now running a significant amount of their business through the new service management solution successfully. And that's really, really important to be able to evidence with you all.

Slide: Overview – New Features in 24R1 (Confidential)

• So, what have we done in 24R1 as part of this workforce and fleshing out in depth of the workforce management solution? Well, that's meant us doing a huge amount of work to align the SLAs with the way that PSO likes to manage its SLAs.
• We've also done some work on what we call Service Organizations, which is a little bit like access groups in FSM when they're used for internal usage, but effectively what we've done now is enabled it so that the organizational unit set up within the application allows you to have service organizations with resources that can move around, whilst maintaining integrity within the supply chain element for the fixed elements of the business if that makes sense. You're going to have depots and warehouses and things like that, that people are tied to, that manages the material supply with physical addresses, but with workers and the operational organization separated out from that part of the organization structure. So, you can then balance resources across territories, and you can move people around, and work is work in reality. And then we separate those two things like that. It was a constraint that FSM customers would never have known about it because it didn't exist in FSM, but it did exist in the architecture of IFS Cloud to hack around with that a little bit.
• We have also started to implement new access control to sit alongside that. That's a forerunner to some of the enhancements we want to make in the role level security setup in IFS cloud, so that it is better and more flexible without the performance hit the comes with access groups in FSM. And that will enable us to do some other investment that I'll talk about in a minute.
• And then we've also done a huge amount of work on something that is new to all of you, around something called task bundling. And the idea behind task bundling is that, yes, we've got things like PSO doing, it's duo on location incentive to try and get work together. But at the end of the day, what we sometimes want to do is say I've got these five pieces of work. They all need to be done at this one site with a customer. They're all on different products, and I would like please to tell PSO to treat these five things together as one bundle of work, and to execute that one bundle, which means we're only doing one health and safety form when we arrive on site, for instance. We're only asking for one customer sign off when we finish the job. And the combined duration, or the total duration is then the total length of the subtasks rather than as five activities with a smaller duration, things like that.
• And part of that work that we did around the service organization management, enables us to do dataset segmentation in the PSO integration and PSO land, and that's part of the ability to manage very large datasets, but segment those data sets up, stitch them all back together again and solve bigger scheduling problems out of IFS Cloud and also move resources very easily from one data set to another without changing organization setup.
• And then we'd still doing a huge amount of work on Dispatch Console. It is a piece of work that we will never ever finish as far as I'm concerned. And in this particular release as well as adding some functionality, you know some capability to the Dispatch Console, we've also focused quite a bit on performance of that client. It's a very, very complex client. As any kind of Gantt based scheduling tool or scheduled visualization tool is, it's a very complex client. It has to handle very, very large volumes of data and performance is very important to a dispatcher, so we've started work on that and we'll do a huge amount of work in the 24R2 cycle on that as well, to the point where it should be quicker. I'm hoping that it is a more performant and quicker with large data sets than even the PSO Workbench, which is best in class in the industry.
• Then on the mobile side, we've made a number of miscellaneous enhancements around productivity, to try and reduce the number of clicks and that the technician has to go through. We've also made some enhancements in workflow configuration. We've made some performance enhancements in the surveys and e-forms, and we've also streamlined and optimized some of the crew work capability, which again isn’t new to all of our existing customer base. So, the main focus really has been there saying, how do we support this global service where we stop being ring fenced organisationally from a fiscal or an inventory management perspective, into looking at how we can set up our operational structure separate from that and leverage the strengths of IFS Cloud and supply chain in a much better way than we've been able to before.

Slide: Overview – Planned Investments in 24R2 (Confidential)

• In terms of what we're moving on to with 24R2. You'll see there's a nice new little box down there called AI, which I'll come on too shortly. Now we really start to enhance things like the time zone handling. We start to implement the row level security and the access handling in a more flexible way. We started that in 24R1, and we carried that through into 24R2.
• We'll start adding in all of the lobbies and dashboards and BI schemas that are needed for you to be able to manage your service organization in a better manner as well.
• We'll then start to take into account tools in resource management in a better way than we do today, and then we'll start doing some work in scheduling and optimization on finishing off elements of that schema alignment with the introduction of things like resource buckets, pulled resources, which is a precursor to us doing some work on contractor, along with things like roaming resources, improvements in the appointment management as well.
• And then I mentioned in dispatch console and dispatcher UX the whole performance side of life and really making that part of the application sing from a performance perspective. That's a big focus for us in 24R2.
• And then in mobile, now we've got loads and loads and loads of capability in mobile. That's great, but the baby's got a little bit ugly over the course of the last few years. So we will put a huge investment during 24R2 and during the two releases in 25 on the UX side and usability side at the mobile application, as well as fleshing out all of the configuration enhancements that are required in order for us to provide the same level of capability you have in FSM, from a configuration perspective, but with guardrails that stop you doing things that could be to the detriment of your application and the integrity of the data within.
• And then we come onto AI. And we are looking at a number of AI scenarios during 24R2 and through into 25 as well. I'll cover that in a little bit more detail, but you will start to see a lot more AI from us in 2024.

Slide: Beyond 24R2

• So, what happens then? What is that beyond I've eluded to us doing four or five things that contribute to the world beyond 2024, and there are a huge number of things we're doing.

Slide: Key larger investment items

• I want to cover off a couple of these today. So, we'll start with AI because I have to think these days.

Slide: IFS.ai

• I'm pretty sure you've all had a few briefings on IFS.ai and what that means to us in reality, what it is, is us thinking about the technology that's used to underpin embedding AI in our application separately from the use cases that you will operate. So, 24R1 includes a huge amount of technology stuff in our area as does 24R2 because the teams are already working on it and in parallel to that we'll be releasing the value scenarios that are really the things that are going to make a difference to your business because there's no point of putting a load of AI technology in but not making that accessible to you in a very easy and natural way.

Slide: Autonomous Shift-Planning (For Field Service)

• And I'll give you some examples of things that we've already done over the course of the last few years. So, we've started with this kind of notion of autonomous shift planning where we turn around and say I would like to have these combinations of resources available on shift. Can you find me the right resource? Can you help me work out which resource should be on shift, at what time? Obviously, you've already got a huge amount of AI in your solution with the way the PSO works. It wasn't called AI when PSO started doing non nondeterministic scheduling, coupled with continuous optimization, coupled with a huge number of algorithms that the engines automatically able to learn from and to choose the right algorithms for the right problems by itself. But all of those are different flavours of AI. If you look at the new AI definitions. One of the things that we have added into the application, this is how we'll surface AI in the application, is something called predictive task duration. And we released the preview of this in 22R2. So, we've been working on this stuff behind the scenes for quite a little while now and it will become more widely available during 2024. But in reality, what this is doing here, is we're looking at a task and the dimensions on this particular task, the task has got a norm time of however many hours it may be. It could be 2 hours in this particular case, but when that's being scheduled, it's being evaluated against an ML model and the duration of that task is automatically being adjusted down from 4 hours to 2 ½ hours. Because our ML model thinks that this task is over specified and could be achieved in a shorter duration of time. And that's already sat in the application. So, we've already been doing things on AI for quite a little while now.

Slide: Insightful Service

• But over the course of 2024 and through into 2025, the work that we're doing will accelerate greatly. We've got this activity duration prediction that's in there. I just showed it to you. And what we're going to do with that is add more and more dimensions to those models to make sure that they are more accurate and take into account more parts of it, more variables and more variations in the way that your businesses work.
• We've also done the first release of the automated travel profile generation, which is the thing that automatically adjusts the travel time based on learning, and we'll expand that out to have more dimensions associated with it. So they're two that you've got the early versions of, that we will continue to evolve and get to a point where they are both widely adopted within the customer base because that's the important thing. These things can only add value if we know whether they're working or not in the field. But those two scenarios are very good starters for us because they help us in doing more complicated things.
• One of the things that we're working on now is a set of ML algorithms for probability assessment, and there are set of algorithms that enable us to assess probabilities in all sorts of different scenarios across the whole application set. What's the probability of this purchase order being delivered on time by the supplier? That's a scenario in supply chain, but we can use those same techniques, albeit with a slightly different model associated with it, in order for us to help predict what do we think the probabilities of this job being completed successfully? So, what's our first time fix probability? What's the probability that the technician's going to be able to arrive on time? What's the probability that the customer will be there for this appointment? Or are we going to get a no show? So, you will start to see a number of AI probability assessment scenarios driven by AI or underpinned by AI, appear in the application during 24R2 and beyond.
• We've also started to work on Copilots in the application and part of that copilot work will then extend down to the mobile device. And the whole idea there is that we look at different mediums, so we include things like image processing and voice, as well as a number of Gen AI models underneath to help advise and guide the Fieldworker, and provide that differentiated experience as part of the overall field worker of the future strategy that I've talked about a few times.
• The next area that will be working on, are all around what we call the intelligent service order and this has got 2 main flavours. One of them for me is almost an extension of the first time fix probability because one of the things I want to do is be able to say, OK, this particular job has got a low probability of first time fix. It's only got 20% first time fix probability. OK, great. But what's the next best action? This is where intelligent service order comes in. Because what I want to do with that is then say, but if you add this part, if you change the skill set, if you add this tool, that first time fix probability will raise from 20% to 80%. Do you therefore want to take that next best action or not? And I think that will be a real game changer because step one is to work out how accurate are we predicting whether we can fix things first time or not, what's our job completion accuracy like. The next thing is how do we increase it? How do we add value to your business and improve the measures and the metrics by which you manage your business? That's one part of intelligent service order.
• The other part of intelligent service order is one that I think will transform the work intake world, whether that's work intake from customers directly, through portals, whether that's in a contact center, or whether that's by IoT integration into the install base, and this is all about us really looking at when a call is being logged. Almost doing the dynamic assessment of ability to correct, ability to fix, coupled with next best action. So, if I'm logging the new request, and I'm saying my air conditioning is broken. I've got an air conditioning fault. That's all I know today. That could be one of 100 different rectification actions. So, what I might want to do then is say, can you find this information out? Is it running hot? Is it running cold? Is it noisy? What is it? But instead of you having to build these complex scripts like you used to in the old days, why don't we get AI to do that for us? How am I going to narrow this down from 100 potential corrective actions to three? What information do I need to gather to augment the content of the request so the technicians got more of an idea of what they're going to be facing when they turn up on site, but also to gather the information we need to make sure that we send in the right technician with the right part to fix the right task, to execute the right task, and that's where intelligent service order and intelligent service catalog come together.
• And then the final side is then when we start looking at service demand, what are the things that are perhaps external to our organization that could influence demand profiles. And how can we predict when those things are going to occur, and what the impact of those things are. So, that we have the right resources in the right place, at the right time, ready for that work to appear. There's going to be a big storm and we have an area that's got a load of overground electrical cables. What does that mean? I've got the forecasting weather event. I know that particular part of the infrastructure is vulnerable to that type of weather event. That means you're probably going to get 100 jobs, 1000 jobs, 10,000 jobs? what kind of skill set it's going to be required? When is that weather event going to occur? What's your resource profile that's needed to be able to meet it when it happens? Because you can predict the demand, but there's no point raising the job, because you can't predict exactly which line's going to go down and which line isn't. But what you can do is look at an area, look at the math, and work out how are you going to be able to respond to that event when it happens. And it's scenarios like that in the demand prediction world that we want to tackle really comprehensively with IFS Cloud.

Slide: Sub Contracting

• I'm going to go to two strategic investment areas that we're making and that's partly because I've got a bit of an appeal to you all about helping us out with these. Let me pick on subcontracting first because more and more of you are using subcontractors as part of your service delivery process and this is an area that we've noticed this increasing trend. We've also noticed that neither IFS applications or FSM or Astea alliance used to necessarily support this process, as well as the industry quite needed it too. And so as well as trying to transition the capability into IFS Cloud, you know that we're looking at extra capability we can add, where it's going to be a differentiator for you and a differentiator for us in the market. And this is an area that I've highlighted as one that I think will make a big difference to a lot of people, and also to IFS in the marketplace in general.

Slide: Why we are doing this? Sub-contracting use cases (Confidential)

• So, I want to put a proper subcontracting solution into IFS Cloud so that we can help you manage and optimize the work that goes to subcontractors and retain visibility throughout the lifecycle of that work. So, if you think about subcontracting, for me there are three main use cases that I want to us to support. One is really where you have a set of fully integrated subcontractors where we know exactly who it is that's working from the subcontractor and you almost manage those people as augmentation to your existing workforce.
• The other really is where you have a demand pool, and that's the scenario where a subcontractor says yes, I'll handle this region of the country for you. I can do this type of work and I'll give you 10 FTEs. And it could be one of 30 people, but ultimately it will be an FTE worth of capacity. So, we need to be able to plan work at that bucket or capacity level, to be able to allocate down to them, but we also need to then know which jobs we allocated out to them, and how those jobs are progressing.
• The other one is really where you almost say I'm not interested in capacity. It's your problem. I've completely outsourced this particular skill set or this particular geographical area, and all jobs are just going to you. And we're just managing the commercial side of that arrangement, and perhaps managing the customer relationship. So we need that up to date job feedback so we know what they're doing, and communicate to the customer accordingly.

Slide: Why we are doing this? Sub-contracting capability (Confidential)

• To fulfil those three use cases, we've looked at a set of capability that we think is needed, and tried to break those down into a number of value increments that will deliver over multiple releases. So that looks something along the lines as supporting the on boarding process, supporting the contracts and the framework agreements that you have with them, managing their performance, penalty management, portals and integration services to be able to communicate effectively with them, to work out whether they're using your material or whether they're providing their own material, and how that works in the material demand side of the task, to be able to split the subcontractors geographically and balance work across those geographies, or balance the work across contracted in geographies where necessary to look at how you bid for work, or how you ask contractors to bid for work, and quote for work and contracts, to manage things like returns and exchanges are parts as part of that process, to manage them at capacity level and to manage them individual level, and to handle the financials behind contracting. So, I'm really excited about this area and if any of you are working closely with contractors and would like to input into the work that we're doing, I would love you to do so. I've got a couple of customers lined up already that we're going to talk to over the course of the next, probably 5-6 months, but I'd really like to understand how you're working with those contractors to make sure that we've got the areas and the capability areas that the top level correct, and that we pull out those key business requirements to make sure that we put a solution to market that's fit for purpose from day one.

Slide: Depot Repair

• The other one is depot repair. I'll pick depot repair because that's been the bit of FSM capability that we know is really strong and that we've talked about least, as things have gone on. So we need to do it. We want to give you at least the same level of capability as you have in FSM today. It is going to take a few releases for us to do it. You will start to see that solution in 25R1, and we're entering into the design cycle for it as we speak. So what will it look like? Well, we'll have a set of capability both for managing the repair process and for managing the logistics, and the material handling associated with it. And that will encompass everything you've got in FSM today, as well as some of the things that sit around that, like the ability to manage change orders and recalls, the ability to manage dispositioning of things as they come in to handle both your own repair and also work with third party repairers, to manage all of the material exchanges associated with the repair process, and also to manage that bulk repair process as well. So don't worry, we will bring everything that you've got in FSM today over to IFS Cloud and we're starting work on that now.

Slide: IFS Cloud Service Management

• Everything I've talked about fits under the same 5 pillars as I've talked about the last time. Hopefully you can see us now delivering and planning to deliver against these five pillars, that will continue to be the case for the next couple of years. And I'm probably in a position now where I'm a lot more buoyant, a lot more excited about where we've got to, but more importantly, welcoming more of you on to the IFS Cloud platform and realizing more of the capability that I know you've rely on to run your businesses in FSM today, or FSM underlines today, over onto IFS Cloud in a way that is hopefully better than you've ever had it before.

Questions / Answers / Feedback / Responses:

• Q: That's been one of my burning questions for about 2 years now. How do we know when IFS Cloud is ready for our FSM migration? So, this tool is absolute music to my ears. Thank you for working on it. When are we going to have this tool?
• A: So that tool is one that's services have got that they can run against your FSM environment with you, in conjunction with the migration tooling as well for doing the data handling, and they can run through now the assessment guide and do the study work to say when do we think we're ready to go, and what do we think the significant gap or significant areas are. We got so many customers that got fairly big configurations or fairly big customizations that were done in FSM that they might need to review and decide what the route forward is. So, the tooling is available for those guys now to sit down with you and work through that migration assessment. In fact, North America have been doing this on probably 8 or 9 customers and potentially implementations so far this year, to start plotting that out and to test the tooling as well to make sure that it does what we needed to do. Because it's alright, us developing some tooling and developing a methodology in a lab, we need to field test it to make sure it's right, especially in organizations like yours that have this FDA certification and some other constraints around you that mean we have to make sure that we get this right first time.

• Q: My question is regarding AI. What about other used cases do you have, an idea wall, or maybe an inbox where we can push more ideas about using AI and IFS Cloud?
• A: We will. I want to be a tiny little bit conservative because I want to see some of the major platform pieces that we need realized, because when we see those, we'll start to see the capabilities. What I don't want to do is end up just taking in a load of suggestions and say yeah, that sounds like a brilliant idea, with no idea whatsoever whether the underpinning technology in the platform is going to be capable of delivering them or not. What I want to do is say right we get what the platform's going to do now. We've got a much better understanding of what that is. Then we can have a sensible conversation with you about each individual scenario and say actually that's a good one. Let's put it out to poll, and maybe use this group as well as a couple of other groups to say guys vet this for us. Do you think this works or does this not work. And I can see this group's input into that process being really important to us going forward. So maybe next time I speak to you, you can come with your AI ideas, and I'll bring a couple of other people with me because they're going to understand it a lot more than me.

• Q: You've presented a lot of stuff on enhancing the platform, enhancing the tool, a ton of features, AI, et cetera. What about the side that is facing towards the final customer? What are you doing there? So, the customers that we serve, how will they benefit more from interacting with the platforms?
• A: I'll tell you more about that in the fall. The reason for that is we are currently looking at the architecture of the CE Portal solution, and how that needs to fit into IFS Cloud in a much tighter and much nicer way. Because what I want to do is provide a set of prebuilt customer engagement content that works with the IFS Cloud service capability out of the box, but it’s highly tailorable in a safe, controlled and easy to use manner that you can even do things like publish your own customer service app, like a prepackaged app off the back of it.

• Q: Last time I remember when I was attending the meeting and you have shown us a kind of a mock-up of the mobile client right where the customer can have access or will have probably access to when we would apply for a testimonial, right? Will be the case then?
• A: We'll be getting there. So, I wanted us to be able to start releasing some of that UX refresh in 24R1 with this cycle. We haven't been able to do that, and I'll say why. That's because of our dear friends at Microsoft deciding to end support on Xamarin and forcing us to move over to .NET MAUI as the underlying client architecture. I don't want to bash Microsoft too much because I know how hard it is to execute on technology transformation, and it's not particularly easy. But that is proving harder than we anticipated to do so, we haven't yet finished it for 24R1. We have nearly finished it though, and I don't want us to start investing in new UX controls and the refresh of the UX. Whilst we're still changing the client platform, because that will indirectly result in instability in the most important part of the service application and I will not jeopardize that. So I've paused work a tiny bit until we've got Maui to a point where I'm happy with it. And then we will then we will start the UX refresh. That UX refresh, we've got stuff on the shelf ready to get added to product. So, you will start to see it in 24R2 without doubt.

• Q: When I take a look on LinkedIn, I can see that IFS Ultimo is promoted a lot with new partnerships, implementation partnerships, and for example we have in one of our subsidiaries IFS Ultimo in place. And I'm quite curious what will be the situation for IFS Cloud Asset Management in comparison to the IFS Ultimo, what will the situation be? Will Ultimo switch to IFS cloud in the future or will it be a standalone?
• A: That's not the plan as it stands today. If you look at the two use cases and the typical customer for two different product lines, they're quite different. Ultimo tends to be used mainly in manufacturing sites within a company, but typically in manufacturing sites, and typically in organizations that have multiple manufacturing sites that are fairly similar to one another. The EAM capability in IFS cloud is typically used in organizations that are centered around the asset management of infrastructure rather than manufacturing sites. And typically with unique assets. So, we've got a lot of power stations. We've got a lot of utilities, we've got a lot of those types of customers. The typical EAM customer that is in the production landscape in IFS Cloud tends to be a manufacturing customer that is using IFS for its ERP and says I want the asset management capability in the same platform. It's not necessarily driven for and built for loads of manufacturing plants. For a customer or a company to do EAM of 100 manufacturing plants, it's not necessarily built for that. It can be done, but that's not necessarily been the target market for it. So, there's no there's no plans to converge, the typical customer base are different industries, or different scenarios, and are typically also different sizes. I would argue that there's a lot of similar capability but the scenarios are quite different and the customer base is quite different between the two.

Next Meeting: 13 May 2024 10:00 AM US Eastern Standard Time / 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST
IFS Combined CollABorative: Tech Talk Session – IFS x Sustainability 

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