Digitalization CollABorative February 2023 - Meet the Member with Trond Aune of Jotun

IFS Digitalization CollABorative - Think Tank Session - Meet the Member: Trond Aune of Jotun

Date of Meeting: 23 February 2023 09:00 AM US Eastern Time 

Jotun Background:

• One of the world's largest manufacturers of paints and coating products
• 10,000+ employees
• 3.5 billion revenue USD
• Headquarters in Norway
• Factories in more than 50 countries
• Implemented IFS over the last 10 years
• Upgraded from 7.5 to Apps 9 in 2018 took 18-24 months
• 400+ Customizations mainly integrations and modifications (not including configurations)

Jotun Cloud Upgrade:

• Aim: Get rid of the 412 customizations and get on an Evergreen platform
• Started with Business Mapping process offered by IFS
• Then started pre-project (more than 10,000 hours, 300 workshops, 800 documents) – focus was to map business requirements.
• Reduced customizations down to 242 (-170) with upgrade to IFS Cloud
• R&D Roadmap reduced more customizations down to 72 (-170)
• 40 modifications and 32 integrations and report customizations remaining
• IFS helped with an Intrusiveness Analysis on the 72 CRIMs (Configurations, Reports, Interfaces, Modifications)
• Big majority had a low intrusive impact, therefore low risk
• Dependent on the Roadmap, therefore upgrade will take approx. 2+ years
• Undecided: IFS Cloud services vs on premise
• Invited business users and those people who sit in the business into sessions where there was learning about IFS Cloud and the new functionality. That helped a lot with the decision process later when it was going to sell in the Evergreen program as they have already seen IFS Cloud. As a result, Jotun was able to focus more efforts on the solution and the content and functionality rather than the business case.

Questions / Answers:

• Q: How far does the collaboration stretch? Do you support in testing, or do you have any communication throughout the development process? Or is it like a black box and you're just waiting for the release?
  A: Its not a black box. Jotun are working closely with IFS consultants who have a close dialogue with R&D.
• Q: Given your estimated timeline i.e. a couple of years to get to the cloud fully, how are you planning on supporting or do you have any concerns around the ongoing support for Apps 9 during that time frame that goes end of life next month?
  A: IFS will support us in case we have problems with Apps 9. We were running on Apps 7.5 for many years on an unsupported version.  Its not recommended, but if you have a good dialogue and relationship with the vendor, I don’t think they will turn around and say that we will not help you.
• Q: Any thoughts about when and how you're going to change? Will it be a big bang, or you would like to do a migration country by country or have you thought about the approach for the change?
  A: Big bang. The reason is that we have so much intercompany, transactions within the group and it will be extremely complex to run 2 the ERP systems with that setup, so one weekend, somewhere, somehow in 2025 Jotun operations will be down for a weekend.
• Q: Do you have business in China and if so, have you thought about the security and things like that such as remaining on the same DB?
  A: Yes, we have operations in China. We have an on premise solution today with our data centres in Oslo and gateways through Hong Kong. Its quite comprehensive and complex but I don’t know all the technical setup. I do think and hope that it will be possible with IFS cloud. We have not so far identified any additional issues for our China operations. We have almost 3000 employees in China and 23 big factories.
• Q: You talked a lot about modifications, but the configurations is also big topic. How are you planning to handle that? Because it's a new interface you need to redo them as well or start from beginning. What is the approach?
  A: We do not have that many configurations, we have rather done customizations in some context that is better if you have two complex configurations you will be struggling to do the upgrade.  IFS will help you however to migrate the configurations across.
• Q: You said that you're using IFS resources to do the job, do you have other partners to do the analysis and helping you with the mapping and so on?
  A: Yes. IFS are our main vendor for the consultancy side, and we are also using an additional partner.
• Q: How do we get access to the Roadmap?
  A: You know IFS is not releasing their Roadmap as such, not even within IFS. I think maybe three months in advance or something like that you get sort of the release plans. So, we don't have an exact Roadmap that they will deliver in 23R2 and in 24R1 and so on.
• Q: You said that when you came down to 72 modifications then it you were a candidate for Evergreen. Is that the right level, or is that the complexity?
  A: It could easily be in 150 as well, or 25 and 25 could have been more dangerous than 150. That is the reason we put so much effort into what we call the intrusiveness analysis, where we went through each of these 72 and put them into categories, low, medium, high and extra high. And we have two in extra high, of course, those we need to give special attention. We need probably need to try to kill them or revisit them. I was not confident 72 was a good figure before I saw the outcome of this intrusiveness analysis. And IFS helped us do that.
• Q: You said you have that many different sites, are you running all those sites in one and the same database?
  A: Yes
• Q: When you go to cloud, will you upgrade that database or we start with a new one?
  A: We will start with a new one. We will start with what we call a fresh install. But as I said, we have not decided to which extent we should do it remote or in a cloud service, that is still under investigation or consideration.
• Q: Do you have any plans or thoughts on training? Because that is what we see is a very big step for all the users since it's completely new user interface and that makes it a very big project for us.
  A: Under the hood, it's still IFS, right? So, there are still a lot of things which is the same. I mean the GL, the finance processes, order processes and the planning has not changed, but yes, the interface has changed and there are new features as well. So, not only training, but also change management because by taking away 170 customizations, it is not a one-to-one replacement of our customizations and the core standard solution with IFS, it takes change management to get there. So, it's not just replacing one functionality with another one, it's replacing our business requirements being sold through a modification in Apps 9 to a standard core solution in IFS Cloud. So, it's not a one to one, therefore we need to change and have change management and training. And we have planned to do that quite extensively during this project.
• Q: And do you have a key user team that is involved in this or how are you organized with so many sites?
  A: In this early phase, we are involving my full team of 35 people and in addition to that, we probably will involve maybe up to 100 core users all around the world. And then as time goes by and we have the solution more and more ready, we will involve the 5000 users at the latest stage, and we will do that training through train the trainer concept. So, my team will train the trainers and then the trainers will train the end users.
• Q: It's partly related to the modifications, but my understanding for cloud you will get access to your own build environment within IFS. And so now you've removed a lot of modifications, but then it opens up the possibility to build your own modifications. Have you thought of any strategy around that? Or where are you in that context?
  A: The strategy is to definitely not build customizations, but I think it's unrealistic to believe that we will manage to do it. So, if we will use the build place, we intend to use IFS to do that. Obviously, the build place also open apps for third parties to do coding for you. We intend to continue to use IFS to do that. But we will try to limit this as much as possible.
• Q: I was a little bit confused because I ask you are you going to do a Big Bang and I mean upgrade from Apps 9 to the cloud, but then you also said you're going to start from fresh.
  A: Yes, we are doing both. We are doing a Big Bang, meaning all companies during the same weekend and at the same time we are starting with a fresh database. Of course, we will migrate all customers, products, prices, suppliers, but we will not take historical transactions with us.
• Q: How are they transferring the data then? I mean in our project we have used data migration always but are there more modern or other ways to do that now?
  A: Technological wise it might be more modern, but it is migrations. They are doing migration scripts but the kind of machinery behind how I am not aware of.
• Q: The coverage of different countries legal requirements, are all countries now in the cloud version that you are planning to go to or are there still countries that you need to apply local packages above the global cloud package.
  A: In Apps 10 you have a localization packages and what they call the “GET solution”. In IFS Cloud they don’t have the “GET solution”. They have taken some of the countries in the GET solution and put it into the core product and they have a Roadmap for further countries to be put in.
• Q: Has that Roadmap affected your planning or thoughts when you're going to go live?
  A: I would rather put it the other way where we have affected IFS R&D on how they are prioritizing those countries because this is one of the really key questions where we have a close dialogue with IFS R&D.

Other Comments:

New features in the 23R3 or 24R1 affected by Customer.

• You know everybody complaints about a lot of clicks in the application such as releasing a purchase order or authorizing a change etc. That would be in the future driven by profiles instead according to my updates from R&D.Price updates, e.g. the vendors are increasing the price more or less every half a year.
• Now you when you update the price you will have functionality in some way to update existing orders that you have outstanding to suppliers. That was also something that our we cannot affect at the moment but they said that this will be available in the new functionality.

Next Meeting: 21 March 2023 11:00 AM US Eastern Time
IFS Digitalization CollABorative - Tech Talk Session with Orjan Ekstrom, Director, Product Management

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