Combined CollABorative April 2025 - An IFS Acquisitions Overview

David Coleman’s Presentation on Acquisitions:  

• It's an exciting space in acquisitions within IFS. Hopefully, you'll get a chance to hear a little bit about that, ask some questions, and learn a few things. So, I'm David Coleman, the COO of the acquisitions unit. My role involves working with our acquisitions both prior to us acquiring them, looking at the selection, going through the due diligence to acquire them, and then helping them. A significant part of my role is helping them once they're within IFS, to make sure that they're part of the family and can reach out to our customers as quickly as possible. I joined a little over a year ago now with IFS and I've been in the software industry for coming up on 20 years. 

• Also, while I'm doing the COO role, there is a wider M&A team within IFS. That team has a mix of people in corporate, people with sales experience, people with experience in product, technical, and customer service. We've got a reasonable team in M&A focused on making sure we bring acquisitions in the right way to help you. One of the themes I'll keep coming back to is that the acquisition strategy for IFS is very much about how we bring additional value to you as customers. The end game is, of course, how we generate value for IFS, but there's a clear focus from all the senior management on bringing value. 

• Just a little bit of history here. We've been doing acquisitions at IFS since 2009, well before the time that I joined, and quite significantly even since 2017. If I just talk through a few of these and give you a flavor: 

1. MPL customer engagement software in 2017. 

2. FSM and WorkWave, both providers of SaaS solutions for field services. 

3. Astea in 2019, also field service management. 

4. Clevest on mobile workforce management, acquired back in 2020. 

5. In 2021, along with the launch of IFS Cloud, Axios, our ESM solution, and Customerville, focused on customer experience. 

6. In 2022, some movement within our RVC, and two of the ones you'll be hearing from in detail in a moment: P2 and Poka in 2023 and Copperleaf along with Empower MX in 2024. 

• P2 is focused on oil and gas. Poka is connected worker. Copperleaf is a leader in asset investment management. Empower MX is on aviation. I know I've downloaded a lot of information there, but I just wanted to give you a flavor of the kind of things we're investing in. What you might have noticed is they tend to fall into a couple of categories: enhancing existing functionality and solutions we have, or expanding into additional use cases. Both areas are where we see customers getting more and more value out of the solution by growing and adding to their existing IFS portfolio. 

• That's a little bit of the history. Where we are today: I'm not going to go too much into this because as customers, you've hopefully seen this kind of information a few times. It's been quite a journey getting where we are. It's now a global business growing very fast. We see 32% on recurring revenue, 38% on cloud revenue. What I want to pull out here is that acquisitions are a material part of that growth by intent. We not only grow organically, but we grow by adding the solutions we are acquiring from these customers, focusing on enhancing current use cases and expanding beyond that. We make sure we do that as much as possible in a seamless way so that you can adopt that value as quickly as possible. 

• As I mentioned at the outset, it's really exciting. You've seen a lot of acquisitions done over the past years. There are more upcoming as well. I can't go into details, but they very much fall along the lines I've been saying, with a focus on industry and making sure we keep the lead we've got on industrial AI. 

• There'll be much more that you'll see over the coming quarters that starts to become available to you. Watch this space.  

Q&A Acquisitions  

• Q : So I came over in May of last year and one of the big things that really got me excited was the acquisition activity. More specifically around how we can take organizations that not only fit what we do in our space and our target markets and as we build it through, but also how it fits the composable platform and the technology sets that we build it into. When you're looking at these areas and you look at these opportunities for improvement. 
  What are the top one or two maybe three things that you look at thematically throughout the acquisition strategy, if you don't mind sharing that? 

• A : The first thing to say is that the acquisition strategy falls into the IFS strategy. So we are focused on the six industries that are core to IFS. We are focused on AI becoming and continuing to be the industrial AI leader. And then when we're looking specifically at acquisitions, it's things like, how does that help our customers that we have already with the solutions they've got. What use cases is it going to add when we look at the flow of how the solution is currently used, for how is whatever we're trying going to going to fit into that is it going to be something that is adjacent to use cases that are already being used within IFS cloud? Or on the enhancing side, what's it going to do to make the software be more valuable? What is it going to help reduce costs? Is it going to improve efficiency to grow top line? So we're really looking at it from that point of view to say, how does this help us and you know you'll you as customers will, I'm sure have seen as we do value assessments with you, that we spend a lot of time trying to understand how does our software drive value within the customers. And the acquisition strategy lines up into that. We look at it in very much the same way. So how would we present this to our customers, how would we present that this is going to be a useful addition to them to their business. 

• Q: When you do that estimate that this is going to enhance our current solution, our current offer to us as a customer, do you take in consideration how long it's going to take to implement that into IFS cloud if I use? 

• A : Yeah, I know that's a great question and yes, so absolutely we do consider that and some of the accusations we look at will be fast tracked to a technical integration and others we will keep technically a little bit separate, but we'll try and manage that from a customer point of view through how we engage with you and our commercial offering. So, we'll try and align more on how we engage and how we commercially offer it. Even when it's not technically embedded from the get go. 
  The aim what we try and do is to make it appear to you that this is just part of the IFS portfolio and we try and take that complexity away from what you need to do and we manage it internally and sometimes that will be a deep technical integration, sometimes it will mean kind of high level integration, but actually the product sit separate for some time until it makes sense to move them together. And I probably should add that I'm not a technical expert, but this philosophy is something that that does pervade through how we look our acquisitions. 
   

Rachel Grillot’s Presentation on Copperleaf: 

• My name is Rachel Grillot. And as Tom and David introduced me, I lead our solution consulting team for Copperleaf. So we are one of IFS's recent acquisitions. We came on board in September. 

• To your point, about technical integrations, Copperleaf is a solution that is currently being integrated into IFS Cloud. So that is at the forefront. The development teams are working together on that right now, and we are looking to release IFS Cloud with Copperleaf in the very early part of 2026. So just putting that out up front. But some of you might be wondering, what is Copperleaf? So let me tell you a little bit about it. But first, I would like to start with a question. I think this is a good thought experiment: what percent of energy utility executives are happy with their current state of investment decision-making? This is a fact from a business site that we follow, but it applies actually to not just energy, but all executives. Curious if anyone wants to throw some guesses in the chat or say them out loud as to what percent of executives you expect are happy with their current state of investment decision-making. Any guesses? 

• I'm sorry to tell you that the correct answer is 5%. So we have 5% of executives that are happy with their current state of investment decision-making. So just one piece of information that points to the fact that this is a difficult thing to solve and do well, with important consequences, and there's room for improvement. So this is setting the stage for what Copperleaf is all about. 

• And the reality is investment decisions are very complex, right? So, every year, organizations such as the ones that you all work for, asset-intensive industrial organizations, have a certain amount of money to spend each year on how to invest in the business, right? So this might be tens of millions, this might be hundreds of millions, this might be billions of dollars, whether it's CapEx or OpEx that need to be spent each year into the business, and they can be spent on different things, right? So, you can reinvest in your infrastructure. So, you have your pipes and your transformers and your production equipment, your chillers, everything that exists, and these pieces of equipment have a natural lifespan. And the question is, OK, well, how long should I expect this thing to continue running, or how long can I feasibly keep just maintaining it or fixing it when it breaks down such that it can keep being functional? 

• And these are complex questions. And then there's also the whole other set of investments that you can make, which is investing into growth. So, investing into new production, right? In the United States, should I move everything onshore, should I start building out new types of materials, or should I build out new capacity to anticipate the future demand in the electric space? So there are all these different decisions that need to be made. 

• My background before I came to Copperleaf was doing research in psychology. And I can tell you that humans are very good at some things like recognizing emotions on faces in a crowd or navigating the spatial task of going to the fridge and opening it and taking out milk and pouring yourself a glass of milk, etc. So that's great. What we are not good at is thinking through probabilistic outcomes across thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of assets and decisions that have uncertain outcomes, thinking about the revenue impact in different future uncertainties. This is a very complex challenge. It's something that humans are not organically good at, and it's something that AI and technology can really help us with. So this is what Copperleaf is all about. This is our MO. We are a data-driven, value-based decision analytic solution powered by industrial AI. So Copperleaf is designed to solve one problem, which is how to spend your money in the best way possible. To be most aligned with your strategy and do the best things you can for your organization. And we work with various asset-intensive industries worldwide. So here's a snapshot. Our biggest presence is in utilities. We've also been moving into transportation, into manufacturing, pharma, etc., energy, and it's the same challenge across all these industries, which is again, how do I invest in my infrastructure, manage risk while also growing profitably in the ways that we want. To give you a view into how Copperleaf fits into the rest of IFS, here's a nice diagram we like to show, which is from the analyst AMCL, showing that when you make decisions in your organization, you start at the top with your organizational direction, and then that's your strategy. And then from there, we feed into investment planning, which is at the strategic or tactical time frame. So looking 25-50 years out all the way tou know, monthly, yearly. That is where Copperleaf asset investment planning sits, and from there you're also going to need to plan out projects at a more granular level. So weekly, monthly, make other operational decisions, maybe using your, you know, EAM, Enterprise Asset Management, and your APM, your project delivery. And IFS Cloud has many solutions that output these types of decisions or manage these types of decisions. But as you can see, Copperleaf is that strategic link. And David and Tom can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the acquisition of Copperleaf was exactly this, which is about filling a capability that IFS did not currently have in IFS Cloud that was going to round out this whole investment lifecycle management, strategic decision-making process. 

• I'm going to briefly walk through what Copperleaf is, how it works, and leave you with some takeaways. If you're interested, we'd love for you to follow up and chat further. Copperleaf is all about value-based decision-making, providing a structure for decision-making linked to your organization's strategy. This ensures that every investment decision you make is aligned with that strategy and is the best choice you could make. 

• At a high level, here's what happens in the Copperleaf solution: 

• Set Up Your Decision-Making Framework: We call this a value framework. You bring in projects or assets, evaluate their potential value or impact on the business, and set your overall portfolio goals, strategy, and constraints. 

• Optimize Your Portfolio: Using the framework, you optimize the portfolio to come up with the best possible plan. Then, you execute it and adapt over time as things change. 

• Historically, organizations have focused on financial affordability, revenue generation, safety, reliability, and utilities. Increasingly, the decision-making sphere is expanding to include resilience, sustainability, flexibility, etc. This makes decision-making more complex as you weigh different factors. 

• Once you've set up your decision framework, you can take an investment and run it through Copperleaf to measure its projected impact. For example, an investment might increase revenue, reduce service interruptions, and have a cost component. Copperleaf measures all benefits, risks, and costs on a common scale, allowing you to calculate the net present value (NPV) of any investment. This results in an objective, quantified NPV for each investment. 

• You can compare different projects. For instance, one project might impact employee productivity and safety, while another might be more expensive but result in a higher NPV. Copperleaf captures all types of investments, whether it's a large growth project or a simple valve replacement and quantifies their strategic value in objective NPV terms. 

• In Copperleaf, you set up optimization with all your constraints, such as budget, service levels, production levels, and outage minimization. The AI optimization system then identifies the best investments and when to make them. Copperleaf also allows for "what-if" analysis, enabling you to ask the system different questions about investment plans given various parameters. For example, you can explore scenarios with different budget levels or emergency events and identify the best set of investments. 

• Here are two case studies to illustrate Copperleaf's impact: 

1. Large Energy Infrastructure in North America: Using Copperleaf to make decisions over a $1 billion portfolio, they delivered a $160 million increase in portfolio value in one year. Even small improvements in decision-making can have a substantial effect on such a large portfolio. 

2. Duke Energy: In the regulated space, Duke Energy used Copperleaf for their T&D grid modernization plan. Copperleaf showed that a $2 billion investment could achieve $6.8 billion in benefits for customers. The Commission approved 100% of the plan, compared to only 75% approval in the previous filing five years earlier. The time to approve was shortened by 70% due to robust justification. 

• These case studies highlight the significant benefits of using Copperleaf for value-based decision-making. If you have any questions or remarks about Copperleaf, feel free to ask! 

Q&A on Copperleaf: 

• Q: How logical operation do you need to be to have enough data to for AI to be efficient? 

• A: I'm glad you asked that question. The reality is copperleaf has different levels of sophistication that could be used in the analysis, such that even if you have very minimal data today, we can get started. And use simple models or use some assumptions and 
  you can already get benefit out of using Copperleaf with let's say simple or missing data in certain places, and then over time as your data improve, we understand data collection, data maturity is a journey, then you can make use of increasing sophistication in the optimization and the models. But we have a client that I spoke with at DISTRIBUTECH. I was there a couple weeks ago. They were using Copperleaf to do some optimization on their substation investments. And they only had, I think in service date for some of their assets and otherwise we made assumptions, but even just with that kind of minimal amount of data, we were able to work with them in the implementation to come up with some kind of consequence valuations and still get a lot of benefit out of Copperleaf. So I would say I'm very confident that whatever state of data you have now, we can get started on something that would provide a lot of value. But of course we can have conversations about it. 

Alexandre Leclerc’s Presentation on Poka: 

• My name's Alex. I'm the CEO and Co-founder of Poka. Before I started Poka, I worked at my family business. I started as an operator. At the age of 15, my father bought our first factory in the US, and I got the chance to commission it. Working as an operator was very eye-opening for me. I couldn't understand why we were still using a ton of paper—165,000 documents in SharePoint. Every factory was recreating their own standards. No one was working as a network; everyone was working in silos. I was very frustrated because I could fix anything at home by going on YouTube and knowing everything that's going on with my friends and family through Facebook. But when we went into our factory, we had a bunch of reports and documents, but it wasn't very user-friendly. Machines are getting more and more complex in factories. Compliance, safety, and quality are becoming more intense, but the way we support our operators and mechanics in industrial settings hasn't evolved. That's really what Poka is all about—empowering people to succeed on the shop floor. If your people can be good at what they do, typically you're in good shape. My grandfather always told me anyone can buy a machine and raw material, but it's our people and culture that make a difference. It's really about how we empower that within large enterprises. 

• We are very lucky to have some of the best brands. One of our best customers is Nestle. We started with one factory about four years ago, and now we're in 395 factories. I think it's a big testament to the quality that we can deliver. Once you start connecting factories together, and that's really one of the key differentiators with Poka, we can connect factories together based on similar types of assets and share knowledge and troubleshooting. We're connecting factories so they can work as a network. In industrial settings, anywhere that has machines is a good place for Poka. We've grown very quickly. The neat thing about Poka is the ease of deployment. We deploy in a matter of hours and days versus months and years. This empowers our customers to deploy the solution quickly, which is why we've been able to deploy in over 2000 factories. 

• I finished my career at my family business as the director of continuous improvement. Driving continuous improvement has been my thing. It's really about making sure that your people have the right information through communication. There are whiteboards in factories. How do we make it better so people spend more time discussing solutions than just explaining problems. How do we bridge the gap between shifts in factories when people find ideas across different areas, and how do we make sure that a new employee has all the forms and checklists they need to complete tasks easily? When they see a deviation or a problem, they can easily escalate it into an issue. Once we solve that issue, how do we capture the knowledge and make it available for future employees? It's about building a learning enterprise and providing the content and tools they need to succeed. 

• My father always told me there are four things he cares about: he wants his people to go home safe at the end of their shift, he wants customers to be happy with the product, he wants the factory to be profitable, and he wants his people to be happy. That's what Poka is all about—health and safety, making sure people know the risks and how to work properly around them, ensuring there are no grey zones. Every time there's an accident, it's like, "Oh, I didn't know this was dangerous." We make sure people understand everything they're going to do and are properly trained. Quality is critical to ensure the product is good. With Poka, we can capture specific instructions in short videos that tell the full story of how to do things properly. Everyone understands it the same way. We look at productivity, identifying bottlenecks and issues, and documenting instructions so anyone working on a machine has the same skill level. My father always asked how we could make all our factories as good as our best one. That's through knowledge and collaboration. 

• People want to feel part of something; they don't want to just be a number. How do we make sure their problems are heard by management and vice versa? We fix issues on the shop floor, making life easier and the factory more efficient. Communication is key. We have our factory feed, think of it as the Facebook or Instagram of your factory, but with work instructions. You can see downtime, near misses, quality issues, and all the good things happening. It's about changing the culture, ensuring people are aware of everything and working together with no communication issues.  

• We digitalize forms, checks, and audits, integrating them with IFS. As you're completing rounds, you can take pictures of problems, create deviations, and convert them into issues. When an employee comes to a workstation, they have 10-15 checklists and audits to do at different frequencies. We provide a compliance level where you can see all the forms and checklists for each workstation and whether they're done on time. 

• Our famous issue management, the Kanban board, allows you to create issues, tag machines, and collaborate to find solutions. Everyone goes on YouTube, but not everyone uploads videos. How do we get people to share their knowledge? Poka has found some very innovative ways to ensure that people can put comments, pictures, or videos on problems, and then we can automatically convert the problem into a selected solution for troubleshooting. Using a social feed to create content has been a game changer for most of our customers. 

• Knowledge management is a key focus, and while we support any media type, we are pushing more on the video format. Videos are one or two minutes long, capturing your best employee's methods and making them available to everyone. Poka has amazing capabilities regarding language translation, making it easy for anyone who speaks different languages to understand what's in the video. 

• We create a massive amount of content for each workstation and asset. We build a skills matrix where you can create skills at the plant level, line level, and equipment level. When you click on a skill, you have the full curriculum of all the different work instructions, both inside and outside of Poka, that you need to follow, along with assessments and exams at the end. We have digitalized all the skills management aspects of the shop floor in Poka, empowering team leads, supervisors, and managers to manage their teams and focus on developing their skills gap.  

• Analytics and dashboards can be built from everything put into Poka. It's neat how deploying root cause analysis, forms, and checklists can ensure people are trained and deploying solutions on the shop floor, building metrics around that. 

• We wouldn't be at IFS if it wasn't for AI. We have amazing capabilities within Poka, including an AI agent where you can ask anything, and based on all the data within Poka, it will provide the best solution. We can also mass upload certain types of PDFs and PowerPoints into Poka, and our AI agent will convert and translate them into different languages, reducing friction regarding content uploading. 

• Our next big release in Q2 is about building factory boards and team boards, logging different aspects for each of those. This provides a single place where you can get information at the line level, plant level, workstation level, or department level. We provide a seamless journey where each module in Poka is integrated with the others, making the user journey much easier. We focus on supervisors, managers, and mechanics spending more time solving issues rather than filling in compliance reports. 

• When you look at Poka with IFS, it's really about the mobile interface and ease of use. We aim to be a system of engagement that feeds a system of record, which is IFS. In the next release, which is in a few weeks. Poka will be able to create work orders automatically from Poka into IFS. We're also synchronizing all the data structure for the assets. We're proud of our fast time to value, going live within four weeks of implementation. 

• So that's a little overview of Poka as a system of engagement and knowledge, connecting to systems of records. That's it for me. Any questions, comments, or worries? 

Discussion between Tom and Alex:  

• [Tom] I guess you know something for me, Alex, that came up whilst you were walking through that. We talk about industry solutions within IFS, focusing specifically on those industries where we know we can deliver a great service and solution. When I was listening to you, I realized that what you do covers so many different industries. It's almost any industry that has assets requiring maintenance to any degree. Anything that might go down or cause a problem needs maintenance and someone to provide a solution. You cover all of it, right? 

• [Alex] Yeah. And I talk about factories, production lines, workstation equipment. As long as there's equipment, there's a structure above that can be changed to refineries, to hospitals. As long as you have machines, that's really where Poka excels. If it's just services, then it's different. But if you have machines that are critical and your people are super important, their knowledge is very important. It makes a difference. That's where we excel. 

• [Tom] I think one of the other things that came to mind, which I picked up from Rachel's presentation, was about ESG—ensuring that environmental and social governance is covered. Maintenance is a really big part of that, isn't it? Ensuring that you're maintaining what you have as opposed to doing a rip and replace every time. Is that something that's front of mind for customers you've been speaking to?  

• [Alex] 100%. Obviously, there's the paperless aspect. But it's about making sure that when people make CIPs, they're doing it the right way. They're not using too much water or letting certain assets run because they didn't know how to turn them off. There are multiple things, but it's about reducing waste. When people make mistakes in large industrial settings, it creates a massive amount of waste. So making sure there are fewer errors drastically reduces waste, which, at the end of the day, is good for the environment. 

Other Comments:  

• [Kindvall] To add on to, to my question maintenance, I don't see it here in your has been a struggle for us as a company, how should we make use of the new investment that you did in our current solution and it's kind of important for us to know when you when you buy something, what is the intention with it and how does the plan look like and it's kind of important for us that you keep that plan also with the maintenance as an example. It's a bit negative here, but it is a disaster for us. 

• [Kevin] And that's what I wanted to call out, because a lot of times acquisitions are always viewed as just grabbing a competitor, market share, or something else. I don't see that here. I see acquisition in the strategic form of rounding out the use case and the technology that we can build into. Groups like this collaborative are really key to that input cycle and collaboration, enabling us to understand where we can put our best foot forward. Thanks. 

Next CollABoratives: 

• 8 May 2025 10:00 AM US EST / 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST
  IFS Digitalization CollABorative: Creating a Collaborative IT Strategy
• 20 May 2025 10:00 AM US EST / 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST
  IFS Service CollABorative: Meet the Member
• 28 May 2025 10:00 AM US EST / 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST
  IFS Assets CollABorative: Think Tank - Incorporating ESG in Capital Planning Decisions

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