IFS CollABorative: Tech Talk with Matt Kempson, SVP Global Customer Services
Date of Meeting: 31 May 2023 10:00 AM US Eastern Time
Matt Kempson Background:
- SVP of Global Customer Services at IFS
- 5 years at IFS
- Worked exclusively within the services organisation
- Focus includes everything from services, research and development, through to customer engagement.
- His teams provide all the inputs to improve the service experience across support, cloud, consulting and success offerings
Slides Covered:
- Outcomes – the solution lifecycle – an Overview
- IFS Solutions and Evergreen: Staying Current and Relevant
- The Evergreen Change Control Process – Staying Current & Relevant
- The Evergreen Change Control Process – Lifecycle Process: Development + Operations
- Key Themes – Across the lifecycle
- IFS – choice and a tailored approach
- IFS Solutions and Evergreen: Staying Current and Relevant
- IFS Build Place Services – Build Place Management
- IFS Build Place Services – Custom Code Maintenance
- IFS Success – Through the solution lifecycle
- Structured Predictable Engagement
Questions / Answers:
- Q: So for the regular updates that you mentioned, which part of the support stack is typically involved, or who leads with your customers, these types of system upgrades that happen regularly?
A: So from the update perspective, they're already made available by the support team, so they're they are available in your build place.
If you want more support than that in terms of applying those, there are two aspects.
There's the technical aspect of pushing that through and that's the build place services to support with the practical activities of that.
If it's evaluating, which updates that you want to apply or that would add value to your business, we are typically supporting our customers through the success engagement (up at the top end) where we're proactively saying we're working with a number of customers in the manufacturing industry, working with R&D, we know that these areas are very likely to be of interest to you. We suggest that we make a plan over the next 6 to 18 months that these are the capabilities that we unlock in your solution. - Q: How do we validate that code is fit to be put into the build place environment in the 1st place? How do we sign that off?
A: We have an on boarding process for custom code. When we provide this service to make sure that everything's been documented in such a way that our, our engineers and our experts can investigate and do those fixes easily. So there's a whole process and a function within IFS that has been built to support this type of experience. - Q: So success in this entire the build plan and what we're proposing, it's something that we are interested in the company, but we haven't done before. The reason why we haven't done it before is basically the time it will take to on board, right? So, over the past ten years or so using IFS, we've built significant tribal knowledge within the organization on how our systems are set up, how our processes run with these systems, how the business process automation applies to business rules, etcetera. What's the general experience for onboarding time like at what point does IFS get comfortable with the customers individual intricacies and be able to kind of run with a request? At what point does where's that pivot, where IFS becomes helpful / useful to assist with these things versus having to hold the hands and still design the solutions that we're so used to designing and building ourselves for our unique business case scenarios.
A: The reality is to get that level of closeness and intimacy, it typically takes 6 or more months to be honest, it's not possible to have people land and in the space of two or three interactions with you have a full understanding of the business context of which it's being used. We have a lot of people that know the product inside and out, but they're not going to know until they start interacting with your users and you're super user communities and your business leads what this actually means, and that's one of the core tenants of why these success agreements run for three to five years because we will work with you on that success plan to have some tactical engagements over that first six months to prove out the value we have to we understand right? This is an investment that you make as a business to drive adoption and get more out of the system. We have to be confident in our contribution, but the reality is we see a massive uptick in your return after that six month mark where you're not having to kind of explain or explain why. And there's a job on our side with the customer success manager making sure that we document things in such a way when we're introducing new people. And that's another one of the big benefits, right? You've gone from having maybe a team of five or six people that you're used to dealing with to having access to subject matter experts for, Brazilian taxation rules for example. But that's the reality is that sometimes you really do need that really need expert and you don't want to have to take a load of time to one board. That person you have your core team, which is your customer success manager and the associated people. If we've got clients that, let's say you're heavy finance users are in the success plan, the first six to 18 months, we're going to work on is driving adoption across different areas. We'll build the Service plan around that and drive a level of consistency, but I think it would be disingenuous of us to say unless we've got an example where maybe you're going through that upgrade now and that we've gone into this eyes wide open and we've decided that we're going to take some of the people involved in that upgrade and incorporate them in that success delivery longer term. But it's a different way of engaging when we have the opportunity to utilize the same people with the same experience, of course we're going to take advantage of that, right? It's in our benefit as well outcome based services. It says you know, you read this document it explains what the outcome is. If we've got people that already have that knowledge and experience, we can deliver that faster and more efficiently. So, for us, we actually cost us more to deliver in those for much more to be honest, to deliver in those first six months because we're having to take that extra time to deliver that same experience and it will be the same on your side just to be clear, we get it right, it does take time. It does take time of you for us to understand your solution better. - Q: And the challenge that there is a big retention problem these days right, people move on pretty quick especially at the junior tech positions. So me hiring configuration analysts or anybody responsible for uplifting our system and really working in IFS to get it configured to how we want it to be. Those people tend to move on before I get really good value from it, cause it's a junior tech job. They're expecting to move up. That's today's culture. So I have a retention problem on that level and as such, I'm now my primary developer back again within the organization and it's unsustainable. So solutions are welcome, but I haven't moved forward because I just don't have time to spend those first six months of hand holding on top of my existing workload, if that makes sense. So that's definitely something I would welcome the transparency and we got to figure out how we can get that to work for the benefit of the long term.
A: Agreed. And it's an interesting theme, cause I've I hear this time and time again, I'd say more than 3/4 of the meetings that I go into, I hear that you know, but pre COVID a lot of the conversations are about safeguarding projects. Post COVID way more of the conversations are about safeguarding operations and I don't know if that's something that others on the caller are seeing as well, because obviously that that impacts where we put that impact, that feedback impacts where we put our focus and investment as well. - Q: So we we're actually did very well through COVID from a business perspective, which is great. And I know that's not the case for most. So for us, it's really on the operational side still, but one of the key things is that we're looking at major upgrades. We have two production environments and one of the concerns is around support of that, not just the upgrade itself, but ongoing support. We struggle today with standard support and so to me I love the idea of the success model, but I am, I'll say, heavily reluctant to put more in the hands of IFS when we don't get great service today in normal support. So my concern is, you know, can I rely on you guys to do the more complex stuff when we get fails repeatedly from the standard? And so to me, that's a question to, I don't know how other guarantees around the success model. What kind of feedback is there and that kind of question?
A: I'll just address that straight up and maybe this is another good use of one of the future sessions that we run is to hear directly from the Unified Support organization. I know a few of you will have gone to the IFS connect events so far and Raymond Jones, our head of Unified support, has been at few of the events and has given a let's say an uncharacteristically open assessment of where we've really been at and what we've not been doing well enough and the responsiveness and the communications around some of the items has been a major pain point that's being communicated from a support perspective and very clearly we need to do better. But what we also need to do is be communicating with you exactly what are we doing to get better and that communication in itself as well hasn't been good enough. So Raymond's been at many of the events personally giving that update of what we're doing. Tony Johnson is somebody else that some of you may have met over the past months and some of these situations where it's gone into an escalation situation and I think it's a massive step in the right direction and you can't take too many positives out of saying we must do better, but the one the one positive part is the level of transparency that we're driving. It can be a risk and to be that open about these things, but the one good thing about all of the IFS communities that I've ever worked in is, you know, you don't expect perfection, but you do expect improvement, you do expect things to be at a certain level, so if we're talking specifically about success, yes it does come with guarantees. Each of the services has a defined outcome and if we haven't provided that outcome, we have to keep going until we have and that's our cost, the way the model works. So that's one guarantee. And with the extra reactive side of things, we've also got service level agreements both on response and on resolution and on service delivery. And again, based on feedback from our customers from day one, that's essential.
You know, there's no way you can buy into an even higher level of engagement without having contractual cover on these things. It's not practical, so that's been built into the model and now we're expanding the build place services and the custom code. And one of the things we're having to work very closely with the Unified Support organization, in fact, that was the last workshop call I was on before this is we won't get everything right from day one, but this has to be seamless. You shouldn't care whether something's caused in core or your custom code, or it happens to be end or business user. There is a responsibility. We accept that on the business and on the IT side to use the solutions in the way they've been designed, but most of the time you know if that 99.999% of the time people aren't wilfully ignorant, right? There's something that's wrong and we have to work out. Is it a documentation thing? Is it an enablement thing? Is it the way the solutions being set up? Is there a more efficient way to view lobbies for example? Is there a more efficient way to access that process in the 1st place and until we get that close engagement, it's going to be really difficult to do that more proactively and that's where the big focus and the investment. It was one of the first things Darren did when he came in, based on the feedback he had is to say we got to do something about this. We're walking in somewhere and people saying we need more help from IFS and we're willing to engage more to get that, but we didn't have anything that we could scale at the time. So it's been a busy few years. - Q: Yeah, I mean it's great. It's good to have the guarantees and the fact that if there are issues that are ongoing, you guys will work to get that fixed. I mean, that's great. Just I'm aware that there's billable hours in there to some degree and as with any consulting organization I would suggest that they make more money when they do things worse. You know from a services perspective because you get more hours, right? If you get paid for the hours and but if you don't and that's OK and it's a fixed and those kind of things, that's great from a bottom line. But ultimately, coming back to the operational success, if something takes 3 months to get fixed, that's not success whether we get it for free or not.
A: Agreed. That's the fall back on the SLA's as well as having the guarantee of the outcome. You've got the guarantee of the time period as well of which that service needs to be provided, and I don't think he's on the call, but if those of you who know Kjetil Gran at Borr Drilling and Borr Drilling were the first ever success customer, I’d credit him fully for this, he was the one who really pushed to say if we want to differentiate ourselves as a software vendor versus a services provider or a consulting business, the one thing we have to do is create a model where you don't have to pay more if it takes us more effort to deliver the same outcome. So that's, that's the massive difference being an outcome focused business versus how we've engaged in the past and again we have to hold our hands up to that. That's not what we as a services organization, we have to be driving again, probably talking to transparently. We're here to drive references. I mean, if you if you want to maximize profits as a software business, you sell software, right? You sell software and subscriptions, the services business becomes a drag. So we're here to create references and that means we need you using the software. We need to help drive adoption. We need to do a really good. We do business in the right way and the more feedback you can provide about what we're doing wrong and what we're doing right as well by the way, because I think that sometimes gets missed, we get so focused on what's not working. We take investment away from things that would push us even further and faster in the right direction. So yeah, we're heavily reliant on you for that feedback. - Q: So we're talking about working on a process where there could be a success plan and we can help improve and I hope would change management and de-risk, but I'm thinking of the people in my organization that are not necessarily privy to this information. And the biggest thing I hear is I don't know what this does. I don't understand the impacts. Is this redundant? What does this drive and they try to use the help function and often the documentation is not there or it's incomplete or it's not quite clear the intent. So it's more of an observation if the intent to use certain items, you guys have vision and I have a different vision because I interpreted differently. That doesn't really help. So how does that issue gets resolved with the success plan?
A: The challenge on the ground is that you have colleagues who currently don't really understand the extent of what IFS can be used for should be used for. Some of them are shrugging. Is this even relevant for me in the 1st place, right? So you can engaging them in a meaningful conversation when they haven't got that level of detail. If you're buying the software new, you've got presales people come in and do the demonstrations and talk about all of the different aspects, but when you're live with the solution and maybe you have it, or maybe you're in project mode, if it's not in scope, there's massive gaps, right? You haven't got IFS there to come and explain stand side by side and explain these things through in a practical way.
So with Success, there are a few different services that can help with that. If it's down at an individual level, we've got specific process walkthroughs that we run.
So, let's say, somebody's been brought in new to the business and they've been nominally assigned as a super user against everyone's best judgment, but you've just added someone leave to use an earlier example when you have no choice but to bring in somebody that understands that function but not necessarily the way that you're set up, we can use the operational success to do a number of almost phone, a friend type services and our response in those situations is typically within two hours.
Just to be clear, within your business hours and practically we can plan more proactive sessions over a longer time and the lead time for those sessions is contractually 15 days, but the vast majority of the time it's five days, OK. It's a very practical in terms of getting that quick support.
|What we're also doing through the expert services which need to be planned a little bit further in advance where the success plan should always have a list of prioritized list of objectives that you have and they should be focused specifically on functional or technical areas that you know need improvement. And I've got many, many clients where I'm sat on the management steering committee for monthly or quarterly and it's an ever changing model, but if you're the service owner for success, you can drive the engagement into certain areas of the business.
So if you're getting a lot of feedback from the supply chain community that we were either having issues with adoption or we've got a load of capability that you believe sits in there, but maybe you're not supply chain expert, you're not able to go toe to toe or engage, and I've had that experience as well. You're engaging with a business functional leader that's maybe used to using a different type of software. They're very, very knowledgeable about the processes themselves, but just not about how it should be done in IFS and therefore they start defaulting to different ways.
It can become quite painful, so again through the expert services we've chunked it down into a bunch of different outcomes and to power phrase everything from assessing a business requirement. What could IFS be used for? To how best to set up to, how best to drive adoption in these areas? It's been chunked down into bite size outcomes so that you can have a more predictable consumption of the service and we when we put that all in the success plan. - Q: Yeah, there's interesting. It's like with COVID, the engagement and retention part is really difficult and we've had a full turnover in one team because of circumstances. So you have power users that have been there for very long time and then you have people that I've been there for three months and they don't understand the why. So having that background for them and you know this is the best practice is really a key missing element. So, I'm happy to hear that I found that quite interesting.
A: And the and the other ones, the tiebreak, right, where you've got different parts of the business advocating to do things in a different way. And if you're on this call, you've probably been trying to drive a standard way of working, hence the business case are doing this stuff in the 1st place, right? And coming in and having somebody independently come in and talk to five other customers setups that are in the same industry as you and talk about practical examples of why it's been set up in a certain way in the drawbacks of doing it in a different way, that's hugely valuable, right? And sometimes it helps not to have someone that was involved in the implementation to come and bring that message. - Q: Since there are many customers using the newest success services and so on, I would like to hear some comments. Our situation is that we have a bunch of customizations like anyone, and it seems that IFS is waiting for us to comment on what can we get rid of and we expect from my office that IFS would tell us that which customizations we could get rid of with the core development and move to configurations and so on. And since they are upgrades and release is coming on a regular frequency, how are well working practices about keeping up to date with the situations? Comparing the customer services and the core capabilities and to kind of give more background to this, I think that our two latest updates, one main version change and one sub version change, they didn't bring anything to the end user. So it's visible, so they are kind of technical upgrades to keep with the product. So kind of and since we are currently using nine, it would be interesting to hear that how is the newest ways of working handling this issue?
A: We need to walk you through the best practice process we have for evaluating the upgrade path, which also includes a functional analysis. But yeah, in a perfect world I would want a script. We don't have a script yet that can tell us exactly what the “as is” to the “to be” would be IFS will end up there. Just to be clear, that's something that we are investing in, but for the time being, we have the manual processes and the steps that we can walk through to guide you through that through that process. And it's essential, right? You can't really move without having done that.
Other Feedback / Responses:
- F: I would have guessed it to be a little bit the opposite to be honest, because for us we kind of went into lockdown mode through the pandemic. Our business was severely impacted like many so went into a place where we weren't spending much money on the projects. And so now that's just starting to change for us where we are getting more project focused and less operational focused. So I guess I'll get a little bit of the counter to that for us specifically.
- F: Yeah, we're in a different cycle. So we're just coming out of a major, major dip we had last year. We had the worst financial performance in 30 years, so for us and I read the Gartner reports, so many of us are really focused on controlling operational costs across the business and think over half the CIO said that's like their number one priority. So for us, we're still in a very challenging environment. I'm going to say, it looks like we're coming through it, but we started worrying about it last June and it was extremely challenging. So I'd be kind of curious what everybody else sees. But yeah, I think it's been a very hard economy. So operational focus, keeping our business moving in a tough economy, depending on where your cycle is in the business has been rough.
- F: I don't have a clear question or anything, but just a few comments about predicting the future kind of projects. We have been using IFS since 2016 and we currently have a project going on from moving from 9 to 10. And we have been struggling to create a kind of road map for the next five years. What updates to do, and they have been surprisingly many moving parts starting from the agreement itself and all this. When we go to the budget creation and it is this has been a bit surprising because I would like to think that when we are talking about ERP systems we talk like decades what we are using it and it has surprised me that we are talking about whether we continue with IFS or not rather often and that's not how it should be in my of perfect world, of course.
R: So what could we do better to really help you move past that. Where do you fill the gaps have been with the way that we've engaged.
F: I think we should be able to create the clear path that work through what kind of steps and continuation projects, we move on to cloud, for example, and what kind of money we are talking about when we do all these updates, because we are in a regulated business.
Finland, we are transmitting electricity, so we have a kind of top which we can spend and if we exceed that then we have to have a public procurement going on of the whole system. And this is a bit special on our business, but predictability on the projects is the key issue currently.
We should have more clear path how we move forward and how expensive those steps are and when we talked about people moving in and out more and more we have that issue also and it has a connection to this because our spent increases when we have to spend more time on getting people in knowing the system and processes and so on. And when all of this is happening at once, like it is currently, then we are having issues.
R: Yeah. And I think any anyone here who's had to put a business case forward to the board for a technical only upgrade, that's not a nice experience trying to have to justify that without making it easy to prove what the business is going to get at the end of it. A new shiny platform, fine. Maybe I'll just raise a couple of initiatives that are happening and have happened within IFS that might not have been communicated well enough. So, we have a program called Momentum which is all about clarifying that upgrade path and you know taking all of the various components and inputs and making it clear what steps need to go through. One of the gaps that existed within the momentum program, and again talking very openly about things that maybe we haven't got right in the past is that that step to do the technical upgrade readiness assessment. They're looking at your existing solution, your customizations. What's it from a both a cost and an effort perspective. What's it going to take you to uplift to the latest version? It's both taken too long and it's been too expensive to get there, which in turn has created an extra hurdle to get over in that you almost got to get a business case signed off before you do the assessment in and of itself. And I hope you agree that it's just not practical. It's not practical to put that obstacle in the way. I think we all understand there are steps that have to you have to go through, but it's making it more difficult than it needs to be. So one of the things that we're doing right now and those of you who are based in the Nordics and have been with us more than five years will have probably seen this in the past is bringing that upgrade factory back. But in the perspective of doing those assessments so that you've got a team that a full time working through those technical steps and we found that we're able to do it in a third of the time and in many cases, we're able to do it at IFS cost. OK, which again removes that barrier completely. So when you're going and having those conversations with IFS, you're saying, at least to a reasonable level of clarity, it's going to be X amount of months and we're looking at X amount of costs and we're expecting that the top five functional improvements are going to be these areas, that level of detail very early on in the process as opposed to what we've seen in the past is you have to go through quite a lot of different steps before you're able to have that level of clarity. And engaged the business, engage the executives in a in a more efficient way.
Chris Leu from ACCO Engineered Systems Success Story:
- I did want to mention we actually are a success program customer and I think we just closed out our first year in May. I'll share some stories that kind of resonate with everybody else.
I don't think I'm unique. When we got our implementation done, I was dealing with the extremely angry executives and I think, IFS came out in 2020 and we negotiated contract and said no and probably came out three more times and we said no.
IFS Came back in 2022, we negotiated again and I think we pulled the trigger because we had the right person in place to lead the agreement. And I kind of resonated when somebody said, hey, I just don't have the time. So I think you have to own that, right?
So a couple things that we did is, and my business was still super angry in 2022 and they were still angry probably about four months ago, and I think it's something we all face, right, going through the old implementation style which is very difficult.
So we did pull the trigger on the program and so some of the things that we've done that I think have made it successful is the person we hired to kind of be the lead extremely successful technology person, put in a QA QC program, so we can thoroughly test everything that comes in, we still have a couple, two kind of internal developers plus we use IFS resources and I think that's been key.
We did build out internally a 3 year road map with our executive team and our business users. For reference, we got about 500 texts across 30 offices in the Western US. All the stuff you're talking about, confusion and everything else, and then we pulled in experts from the business team to really be those lies on a coordinate across all those teams.
And so when we signed up for the success program we had a clear road map of what we wanted to accomplish. Just really get an upgrade done. We hadn't done one since the implementation and that came in on budget. Sorry I can't remember the timeline, but I want to say that we were about a month late, which is pretty good for us as we have tended to see timelines double and triple.
So I thought that was successful from that standpoint and then we took on a pretty challenging project. We really wanted to do some innovation, so we partnered with IFS, our internal team and we actually implemented a virtual credit card for all their field techs. So instead of them calling in getting purchase orders and tracking everything, we actually have a credit card they actually scan or the vendor can upload the parts and that goes directly into IFS. We kind of ubered the back end of the business and we just finish launching that on time and under budget and kind of looks like it's going to be a huge success for the company with massive returns. And myself and our executive team is starting to see this real change in shift and delivery and we're getting ready for our next upgrade.
Some of the things we've seen from IFS, from a resource perspective, I'll say professional services is to get you to the up and running, but not much fast that still lives with that frustration.
We've had the same resources for a year, and they've got a good relationship with our internal team. So it's kind of that consistency of discovery. I'm not sure if it's six months or longer. It takes 3 months to even find out and get your team together. So, it's it is a very slow uh onboarding process. And then IFS is actually also gone off the map.
We don't use IFS for our financials and so we need somebody to help. So, they actually dug through their services and found us somebody who is expert between IFS and the system and helped us with the financial upgrades.
So it's been an interesting journey to make it successful. I don't think it's an easy path and I don't think there's a one size fits all. And like I said, you got to keep negotiating your contract and make sure it makes sense for you. I think it's still favourable to the IFS site and you want to make sure it matches what your needs are. We worked hard on that with IFS to come to those agreements, but that's been our journey after year one and you worry about, gosh, I'm committing this is a large amount of money. Are we going to get what we promised? These agreements are extremely scary to sign up for. I think it's challenging. I think you still have to own it. Somebody said, do we still have to design it? Yeah, I think you do. But I think you have to design it and test it and then partner with IFS to complement the resources that you're going to have on the side of the fence. And unless you're going to totally go outsource. But that's scary by itself, so I think that I like that nice balance of resources. So that's been our journey. It's still ongoing. And I actually have a happy business now and it's really funny. We're doing a road map and about three months ago they came in and yelled at us. They forgot the road map and said, oh you, what are we doing? Aren't you working on this? So alright, we'll pivot over here. So I think that communication piece between all the stakeholders and business is super critical. It's always undervalued. We don't want to spend enough time communicating and we're still trying to get better at that. So that's kind of our journey if anybody is interested, I can connect them with our team that's running this. How did you guys do it? But what are your key points? Your more than welcome through Sarah to reach out to me and I can connect you with our team.
If you are an IFS Customer and would like to watch the recording, please email jessica.foon@ifs.com
A copy of the slides can be found in the attachments section below.
Next Meeting: 29 June 2023 11:00 AM US Eastern Time
Combined Session - Tech Talk Session with Cathie Hall, SVP Experience at IFS
If you are an IFS Customer and you do not have the next meeting invitation to this CollABorative and would like to join, please email jessica.foon@ifs.com