Digitalization CollABorative January 2025 - Maximizing the Value of Your Technology Investment

IFS Digitalization CollABorative: Tech Talk - Maximizing the Value of Your Technology Investment with Brendan Viggers

Date of Meeting: 28 January 2025 10:00 AM US Eastern Standard Time

Brendan Viggers Background:

• Global head of business value engineering at IFS
• Been at IFS for 18 years
• Been in the value engineering team for the last five years
• Working with customers all over the world, both presales and post sales, helping them to really get the most out of using their solutions from IFS, from an outcome-based perspective

Brendan Viggers Presentation:  

Slide: Achieve tangible outcomes / Maintain alignment with strategic goals

• There's two things you want to achieve with your digital transformation. One is you want to achieve intangible outcomes, you want to be able to measure what you want to get out of your investment and to be able to achieve those. But you also want to make sure that you're constantly aligning your solutions with what you're trying to do in terms of your strategic goals. A really good example of this is the advent of AI in the last few years. So many customers that I speak to now have insignificant initiatives or strategic initiatives towards using AI to improve the way they work. So how do you make sure that what you're trying to do aligns to those types of goals? Another great example is sustainability. When you have your environmental or your social governance goals. How do you make sure we're aligning our transformations towards achieving those goals, but that we're actually measuring them and achieving them along the way? So that's the purpose and that's the goal of my session is to help you understand how you can track the value of your initiatives, because that's crucial for helping you ensure that the organisation achieve those outcomes, and by measuring the value you can demonstrate return on investment. It can help you optimise future investments, but also really foster confidence from all stakeholders in the business that when you want to drive the next initiative it'll be a success. It can really help with the buy in for any future changes.
• There are challenges that come with this. Being able to track value has to start very young engagement. Part of my session today will give you insights into how we've helped companies enable value relation. But some of the challenges that you might face along the way, and how we can help you mitigate those challenges.

Slide: Advantages of tracking business value

• So, what are the advantages of tracking business value? One, it can really help with enhanced decision making. It can help you provide you with data-driven insights to help you prioritise future initiatives. And also, when you start to consider the business value of initiatives that can help you identify the highest potential for impact. When you're talking to investment team, these initiatives are going to help us drive the most NPV after a certain amount of time. It's really good way to help you decide what to do next.
• It can help you give that improved ROI measurement. So actually, probably demonstrate that you have had a financial operational return on the investments that you've made.
• It can help ensure that you are aligning with those strategic goals and so the investments we're making, the effort that we're putting in to change the way we work is helping us align with what's to do strategically.
• We're building trust and we're getting buy in from leadership and investors and employees by showing that what we're doing is actually achieving measurable results. And that that drives confidence into future decisions.
• We can enable continuous improvement. By ensuring that you're focused on optimising, it can help to identify gaps in efficiencies in those initiatives. So if you're off track, to achieving those outcomes, what can we do together to bring us back on track. And this can be a really good driver for continuous improvement activities.
• And finally, it's the competitive advantage. By being agile, by driving innovation and adaptability, can really help you strengthen your market position and build trust in your customers as well. Really help you deliver those moments of service that we talk about.

Slide: Why don’t you track business value?

• The advantages to tracking business value are clear. So why don't we? There was a study done by McKinsey. They looked at 5400 large IT change projects. And they found that over 45% run over budget. Some run over time. I always think this is because the go live data is often fixed regardless of what happens in terms of our implementation, we will go live on a certain date, whether ready or not. And I think that contributes to the last statistic there, which is that over 56% of those 5400 projects delivered less value than anticipated. They didn't set themselves up to track in the start. They didn't communicate what it is we're trying to do. They didn't track that investment and therefore they were unable to say whether that change actually delivered value. And that's what we want to try and address with our value assurance programme.

Slide: Challenges of tracking business value

• What are some of the challenges then to doing this? Some of those companies that struggle to do it probably recognise some of these challenges.
• We know there's a complexity of metrics. When I do these discussions with customers and we ask about what are the KPIs they are using to measure a process, identifying and agreeing these can be is really difficult. And even harder for some of the intangible outcomes like customer experience. So, having a way to make sure you're focused on the right KPIs and that you've got good benchmarks and good metrics that we can agree on, is one of the challenges.
• A second is data integration. We all have multiple systems in our current technical landscapes. That data is fragmented. The sources don't often talk to each other, and this can actually hinder our accurate measurements and analysis. This can actually stop us from able to track a KPI towards a goal because we're just unable to actually properly measure where this data is coming from.
• There's a time lag of results. One of the things we always say at IFS is that success is not the definition of a go live of a piece of software. The tracking of business value happens from the day you go live. And the realisation of these results will happen over an extended period. They're not going to happen overnight. So, to make sure that we can track these initiatives over months often, what can be months of effort, makes it difficult to often correlate these efforts with outcomes. So, having a focus on a go live date of an initiative to its intended goal is really important.
• There's always a resistance to change. And I think this is one of the biggest challenges we have. It's all around people. You need executive support and active sponsorship of initiative and we need to get adequate buy in to making that change and make sure that we resource it properly with the right people. Sometimes there's a resistance to a specific solution, so actually getting people to understand that this new way of working is going to improve the way we deliver our products and services to our customers. That can offer a lot of resistance to change. You always have cultural and organisational structure changes. Pulling people out of their day jobs to enact a change and enact a new way of working. Then putting them back means you just lose those people straight away. So how do you embed that within the culture? Not an as a saturation to change. We're very much aware of this in IFS the last five years. We have changed phenomenally. And sometimes the amount of change you do get saturated with it. And when that happens, how do you prioritise what you do? And that's really important.
• As I said at the start, goals are constantly evolving, so market conditions change. Your organisational priorities will change, and it's hard to make it maintain that consistency with value tracking frameworks when you've constantly got new initiatives coming in.
• And finally, how do you actually attribute the impact of additional transformation to what actually what you've done. There are many external factors that also drive the successful outcome of initiative. And I think this can be one of the tricky challenges when tracking value.

Slide: Managing Strategy and Stakeholders / Mastering Technology and Content / Building Effective Teams / Excelling at Project Delivery

• What the McKinsey study showed us was that the ones that did it really well, so the companies that were on the other side of that 56%, the ones that did realise value. They focused on these four areas.
• So very early on in engagement, they ensured that they did some level of strategic planning and they sat down as a team and determined what those strategic goals were. And then engaged leadership. They looked at line of business leaders, heads of process, key users within an organisation to ensure that the vision was understood. And that they got buy in from the business before making this change. It's all about managing the strategy in those stakeholders.
• The second thing they did was to use blueprints to accelerate what a future state could look like. By understanding your business processes, your IT landscape, doing that as is, to to be modelling. Really help them understand what that future solution would look like. And it really sets you up to be able to actually track that value, post go live. When you understand what that as is, to to be is going to be.
• The third thing they did was build effective teams. I talked about one of the challenges being that governance and cultural change, making sure that everyone understands what it is we're trying to do, how we're going to get there, what that journey looks like, and who needs to be involved. And that's not just from a business, but also an IT perspective as well. Ensuring that we align that full enterprise architecture, And early on we create a transformation plan. We can socialise. This is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to get to our go live. Then post go live, this is how we're going to transform as a business. These are these initiatives are going to be implemented and realised.
• And then you hit your go live date. So, at this point is when you can start actually start to drive that continuous improvement. You can fully implement that transformation plan. But make sure that you constantly come back and review it. Put in place a quarterly business review process where you realign your strategy. You check that you're still on track to achieve your strategic goals. And nothing new has come in. That your current state can meet your future state. And this way you can then really start to drive lean thinking and do continuous improvement. They just call that basic excelling. It just basic project delivery.

Slide: Business Value – Modelling / Discovery / Delivery / Realization

• So, what we've done at IFS has developed a business value assurance programme around these four pillars. We have a value engineering team here at IFS and we focus on what we call driving value assurance. Making sure that the staff of engagement we do value modelling, we help identify a common shared vision of what it is we're trying to achieve with this with this change.
• That through our discovery process we can model or map the as is, to the to be. Importantly, that's from both a business and a technical perspective. So, we can free understand where we're at today, what the current level of performance is and what we expect to be able to achieve in the future.
• But we do business value delivery. We scope and deliver that business value through our delivery teams. We use scope tool to build up that transformation plan, but also to create a success plan straight away.
• With the right KPI’s in it, so that as soon as we go live, we're able to do that value realisation. That final pillar there where we can hold everyone to account, to actually achieve those outcomes through being able to track those business initiatives, to track that value.

Slide: Business Value Cycle

• I hope some of you have seen my value assurance lifecycle. I don't see this as a linear process. Like I said, this is something that we should constantly come back to and refer to at all times. So, on a quarterly basis and we come back to our strategy cycle, we look at our vision and we and we check that our strategic goals and KPIs actually align to what it is we're trying to do. That we understand what our current state is and that we know what we're trying to do in our future state through discovery.
• Through the planning cycle, we make sure the enterprise architectures aligned, we know what integrations, what changes, what reporting you need to make. And we create that as a proper transformation plan that that helps to control our scope as well. Ensures we don't do scope creep.
• And once we go live to make sure that we implement and coordinate that plan in a in a structured way. Any short term corrections, anything that we identify that you know just how we want to work it doesn't affect our overall structure or overall current state. And let's do that in an agile way. Let's build those changes in quickly.
• But if they're longer term corrections, we need to go back and do that process again so that we don't get that change saturation. We are in control of what it is we're trying to achieve and that we can ensure we can track that value throughout that life cycle as well.

Slide: Business Value Modelling

• Business value modelling. This is the start of the journey and the idea with this is to identify the common shared vision.

Slide: IFS Six Box Model

• And the tool we use for this is what we call a 6 box model. As you can see, it's dropped around six boxes. What I love about this process is it puts everything that we're trying to do on one page.

Slide: IFS Six Box Model – Business Initiatives

• In the top corner, I can immediately understand what my business initiatives are. I can document these in terms of maybe it's growth, we're trying to drive new revenues, often it's cost saving or efficient efficiency and effectivity programmes. We know a lot of our customers today are facing resource issues. What efficiency and effectivity can we drive out of our processes by using more modern software solutions. But also ESG I mentioned at the start and sustainability is on a lot of people's agendas right now. And we often see these as keeping key business initiatives and how we can drive that ESG agenda in our solutions today. Having a good understanding of what the initiatives are, and you will see that there's also some targets on there as well. What is it we're actually trying to do? In that growth strategy, 50% revenue growth in five years to a number, we want to do a geographic expansion to three new regions. We want to deliver half a billion dollars of revenue from aftermarket businesses. I'm able to understand what that goal is, and that we can measure that goal straight away.

Slide: IFS Six Box Model – As-Is Landscape

• Then we'll go to the next stage. Our as is landscape. This is all about to seeing what it is we have today. Yeah. Looking at the number of people where we operate, what our processes are, and from a technical perspective, how are we supported by our IT today.

Slide: IFS Six Box Model – Obstacles

• And typically, that leads to some challenges. We call these obstacles on the six box model. So, these obstacles, we've we found a non-compliance in our reporting, we have poor collaboration between R&D and engineering departments due to interfaces or integrations or silos, an ageing workforce. The idea with these challenges if you like, is that they're stopping us from achieving these initiatives. And it's really important that we can have a story around this vision, because this is what we're trying to address. This is what we want to do as a company. These are strategic goals. This is what we have today in our as is landscape, these are some of the challenges that we have, and it's stopping us from achieving these initiatives.

Slide: IFS Six Box Model – To-Be Landscape

• Because then what you can say in your to be landscape, is to say what you'd like to be. What are the business processes, what are the new business models, some of the maybe new IT that you want to invest in. It's going to help you achieve some of those objectives. It's going to help you remove those challenges today.

Slide: IFS Six Box Model – Enablers

• Then, by fully understanding the enablers as well, and we can now start to
• see what it is we need to put in place. These enablers, they can include things like applications, IFS Cloud, ERP, and they can also include services, so things like success to help drive those changes. Often people struggle putting a business case for change together. So how do how do I get investment to make this change? How do I go to my boss and say look, I've got this really good idea. These are some of the challenges we have today. What I'd have is this to be landscape here. I can see that there's some enablers. I've done some research. But I should get a business case together for this investment. We include those as enablers, A good case of change can be a key enabler to helping us achieve that future goal.

Slide: IFS Six Box Model – Business Case

• And finally the business case. The last block on our six box model is the case for change. What we typically do is come up with this vision for change as a as a starter. And the initial business case for change might be done with one or two people. And what the business will say to you as well, what we'd like you to do is actually go into my business and rediscover that value. Do business value discovery first. I want to get leadership buy in please for making this vision a reality. And that's where we moved to our next stage. So, we've come up with a vision of change. We understand what the as is, to to be looks like. We've documented some of the challenges and know there's some enablers in there. Can you now please go into the business and help you create a business case for change.

Slide: Business value discovery

• This is where our value discovery comes in. And we start the value discovery on what we call a thin slice.

Slide: Scope Overview

• We have what we call value packets. They're typically a set of business processes with key business activities that you will do in your industry. We have them for construction, for manufacturing, aerospace and defence and utilities, service and so on. Where we know that you'll drive these main business processes, we call them swim lanes. And that within those swim lanes, you all do some specific business activities. And what we want to try and do is use this value packet and take a thin slice approach through here. How does a product or a service that you deliver move through this this process from initially manufacturing it, to installing it, through your asset management, to servicing it, and to making sure that you're buying the right parts, to maintain the inventory, you've got resources that can actually support it, and that you're paying your suppliers on time, and receiving those invoices in from your customers. What does that thin slice look like through this process? And working with your teams, we can identify individual benefits within each of these areas. They can be cost savings, they can be productivity improvements, potentially new opportunities for additional revenue, or risk and compliance. And these then are documented across this scope.

Slide: Ventechi – Ventechi Business Value Assurance

• After we complete the exercise, we can provide really constructive reports that not only shows you how many potential benefits there are from this as is, to to be, but help you prioritise what process areas we should do first. Should it be the asset management swim lane or should we focus on the specific benefit driver like enabling growth. Maybe there's a specific capability within the software that you'd like to look at, say, inventory replenishment. Are your strategic goals mainly around driving cost savings, so do you want to focus on the cost benefits. It really helps you to slice and dice and prioritise which change initiatives you're going to want to do first.

Slide: Ventechi – Ventechi Business Value Assurance

• Another great thing you get out of a value assessment is the actual business value of some of these changes as well. So, by understanding that as, to to be, you can apply some value based metrics to these to say, yeah if we can make a centred saving in the way we operate in our HCM process, there is a significant business value to achieving this. That's always important that these are conservative. We work closely to make sure that we're on always on the right side of a value. We'll never overestimate or over-egg the potential value that you can get. It's always going to be on the right side for you. And that's really important because that helps to get the buy into making these investment decisions.

Slide: Application Landscapes

• The other thing we do along the way is what we call a landscape assessment. So, looking at your as is processes today, look at your CRM, your product development or projects. We can capture all the business applications or typically excel add ins. And where you have a cost to actually delivering a process where you have an air gap in a process that can be removed, that can be automated.
• And actually try and document those in a to be landscape as well.

Slide: Integration Overview

• This is great because this can really help with the data silos. What does it we must make sure that we must have integrated? So for a process to work, to achieve those business benefits, we must make sure that we maintain these integrations. This is really important.

Slide: Replacement Overview

• We can also say what could we remove out of the way. So, the technical cost of ownership or the total cost of ownership of a process, we can see can be dramatically reduced if we can automate or improve the way we work today.

Slide: Ventechi – Ventechi Business Value Assurance

• And the final outcome of the value discovery can be fully costed and signed up for business case for change. That is done with the business. They're all there. The metrics underneath have been agreed, and that total value can then be tracked over those five years. We can see what the ramp up can be and how that net present value will be realised over time.

Slide: Business value delivery

• Then moving to our value delivery phase. This is all around scoping and making sure we deliver that business value.

Slide: Value driven design

• And to do this, we have a number of tools to support. We have our value assessment. We've gone through our digital business value assessment platform. We've captured those business benefits, but also technical benefits as well. And we need put those into what we call scope tool. Scope tool is your scope. This is the processes that we will implement and includes all those process and model indicators, the main process documentation, and workshop material for how that scope will be implemented in your final solution.

Slide: Scope Tool (Ventechi)

• What's really important with the scope is not only do we have the processes documented, this is everything we're going to do. It enables you to prioritise as well here. And part of that prioritisation can actually be to look at the benefits that we have documented in our value discovery. So, we looked at manufacturing, that manufacturing swim lane, one of the business activities is quality management.

Slide: Benefits Matrix

• Which of those processes are actually going to help me realise that quality management benefit or benefits. This can help you see not only priorities, but also what the knock on effects will be. If I don't implement this process, I cannot even have a chance to realise this business benefit over here. I need to make sure that I've integrated to these applications that I've implemented this process in a good way in order to be able to start to be able to track the value and the outcome that we've defined up front.

Slide: Scope Tool (Ventechi)

• And these benefits are then tagged directly into those processes as well. So here you can see for our master planning process within manufacturing, we've got 3 defined benefits and we can go into the details of those and see what the as is, to to be, how we're measuring those, what the KPI is.

Slide: IFS Lobby (Solution Discrete Manufacturing)

• And this can all be transferred over into our lobbies. So, within standard lobby set up we have what we call IFS central. IFS central contains just a range of industry lobbies with measures, but also solution lobbies as well.  We have a distinct lobby within IFS Central for managing discrete manufacturing. It includes those core business processes, those swim lanes that I showed you a minute ago. As I said, business processes and it also help enables you to drill into some of those supporting processes as well.

Slide: IFS Lobby (Procurement Central)

• We can drill into, say, procurement central. You can see within procurement central what some of those KPIs would be. We've agreed the target now, and I now need to make sure that we can measure the maverick spend. We can measure our cost saving to give us an actual number. And this could come from one to multiple data sources. How do you bring that actual cost saving number, the actual managed cost KPI, and then we can visualise that in the lobby in here.

Slide: IFS Lobby (Manufacturing Central)

• Once you are done with procurement. We could do it for manufacturing. What those manufacturing KPIs be. The IFS entry log is also help you drill into what's going wrong as well. So, if one of those KPIs is off track, is off target, you've got ways to drill directly into the data from those lobbies as well.

Slide: IFS Lobby (Planning Central)

• Here you have your planning central with those planning central KPIs.

Slide: IFS Lobby (Inventory Central)

• The last example could be inventory. So, part of that implementation aligns that enterprise architecture is to make sure that we are transparent and how we're going to measure those these KPIs, that we understand what the target is, the targets come from our value discovery. We know how we're going to measure it, and where we're going to get that data from.
• In the last section then is value realisation. So, let's assume we've now logged out the software. We've delivered that scope through our delivery teams, we now have some lobbies with some KPIs that's going to help you see where you're currently at in terms of achieving those outcomes, achieving those KPIs.

Slide: Business value realisation

• We now have business realisation. And this is designed to make sure that we hold everyone to account to achieve those outcomes. We know post go live, things don't always go perfectly. But if we can have a way of actually being able to track and visualise how we're doing, we're more likely to ensure that we do achieve those outcomes.

Slide: Value driven realisation

• Then built on from the value assessment and scope tool. We can now drive those initiatives into a success plan, what we call true IFS success and you've got your lobbies now structured in IFS Central. These are the four parts that's going to really enable our value driven realisation.

Slide: Full Success Plan

• I'm sure most of you have seen a success plan. But like I said, these are about long term commitments and long term outcomes. The idea with a value based trackable initiative in a success plan is it has a go live date. This is when it will be ready in the software. And that we then intend to be able to realise the value of that initiative over time. Some of those initiatives might take years, some might be short term initiatives where you get faster time to value. And making sure that you've got them on your plan, that we're committing together to achieve those outcomes is how we can actually track the business value and the goals that we want.
• What you try and do is make sure that we align them to our strategic initiatives as well. So, we have our efficiency and effectivity programme here from our vision. We have that 50% revenue growth in in five years. What initiatives can we attach to that? In this example here we had a new initiative to increase our asset up time and so this is a new goal that came in. What we did then was create three tap initiatives to help us deliver this increase of that up time strategic goal. We did an assessment around improving our maintenance operations, our OE and reducing our maintenance downtime. And here we can see exactly how far we are now progressing in terms of achieving not just the maintenance operations improvement, but also the business value of it as well. We've said by going from the as is to the to be. There's a KPI improvement, but there's also an inherent value in doing this as well. We understand what that value is.

Slide: Success Plan Initiative Tracking: Full Success Plan

• Within success we have the ability to do value tracking as well. So here are my three value-based initiatives that I want to track. And what we can do is for a regular review process is make sure we go back to our IFS central where we'll have a lobby that's giving us our current performance and where are we at in terms of reducing our maintenance downtime. And then every month or quarter, however, you want to measure this, we can have a history of how we're doing. So, to start off with, we went quite slowly. What they showed is actually when we started to measure, we were actually further away from where we thought we were when we did our discovery. And this often happens. When you when you do discovery, you're not exactly sure of where you're at, but actually when you do it through success and through valorisation, you can then start to be very accurate in terms of your current performance. So here it showed we were actually behind our baseline of 230. We were 235. And for the first couple of months, we didn't do much, but then we made some investment and we put in some significant effort together to look at how we're performing. We had a step change in terms of that reducing maintenance downtime. Then we went a bit flat for a bit, but then we got more buy into making this change, and then we hit our target here in after eight months or so. This tracker shows that we had a goal to achieve this outcome within a year and a half, within 18 months, but actually by holding everyone to account and making sure we provide the right services and engaging everybody in this change, we were able to deliver this initiative, this improvement and this business value much faster.

Slide: Continuous lifecycle to track business value

• I talked about making sure it's a continuous life cycle. I've shown you some of the tools that we put in place in our business value assurance, to really help drive the ability to track business value. By using our six box model, this enables us to constantly review the vision, and talked about the challenge of evolving goals. And so, as market conditions shift, as organisational priorities change, by using the six box model you can ensure that we're constantly aligned in the organisation to a common vision.
• Use the business scope to identify the complexity of those metrics. We can use the scope to not only identify, but also agree on what the right KPI’s are that we should measure, so that we understand what that as is and that to be looks like, and it helps us then to really look at tangible outcomes and not just be focused on intangible outcomes like customer experience but actual real business benefits, real business change.
• Using those accelerators to map that as is to to be. This can really help us understand those integration issues. We've seen time and time again how many applications, little databases, Excel spreadsheets are used to support a business process. And this fragmented data does hinder the accurate measurement analysis of some of these initiatives. By understanding it, it helps us to understand what the current level of performance is.
• The business value assessment really helps us understand what the improvements and the enablers are. That's what we need to do in the to be landscape. I talked about attribution challenges so much change happens and some of these external factors. This can help us really focus on what we should do first.
• Having the KPI structured in the lobby helps make them open and transparent. Everyone knows where to go to see the changes that we're making, and that we're going in the right direction. And this can help reduce that resistance to change by showing people what we're doing, the transformations we're making are having a positive impact on the business.
• And finally defining what success looks like before the go live. This can help us not eliminate the time lag of results but show that we are progressing in a good way towards achieving those results. It's not going to happen overnight. The go live is the start point. By working together, by ensuring that everyone's working in the right direction to achieve those outcomes, and we can make those together. And part of that success planning should be to go back. Make sure you think of that as a continuous life cycle. Short term corrections that don't affect the overall strategic goals or the current as is landscape. Let's do those fast, fail fast, get them in quickly. If they're longer-term corrections, make sure that they're properly thought about, that we do the as is, to to be mapping, that we align the enterprise architecture again.

Slide: Advantages of tracking business value

• And just to reiterate. If we do that these, these are the advantages that we can do. By ensuring that we have a good business value assurance process in place, it can help you enhance that decision making. You can provide real data-driven insights to help you prioritise those initiatives.
• You'll start to get ROI measurements. You can start to say that the time to value for doing this piece of work was X months. This is the business value we realise.
• Always ensuring that what we're doing is aligned to our strategic goals. For those that are on the business side, and this can make sure you provide the right requirements to IT. For those on the IT side and you can get that requirement from the business. It's really powerful, so make sure you've got that alignment and that vision.
• Getting that trust and buy in also builds confidence. When you're showing that you're delivering measurable results and you want to do the next project, you're more likely to get the go ahead to do the next investment.
• We want to do continuous improvement. This is the Nirvana, where we're driving those six sigma processes where we are being lean. We're looking at what we're doing, like constantly identifying gaps and efficiencies and improving the way we work.
• And ultimately that should enable us to drive a better competitive advantage in what we do.

Questions / Answers / Feedback / Responses:

• Q: I was not aware of this IFS scoping tool of Ventechi. In my organisation we are using 2c8. Have you had experience working with 2c8 scoping tool and provide me some comparison between the two?
• A: The Ventechi is a company model that we use. It's a fake company that we have in IFS. I've produced it using 2c8. It is a dummy organisation we use for our demos. If you have a pre burner, if you have a scope tool model, you can use that to generate your business scope in 2c8. So, I hope you have it.
• R: Yes, we do. I there was thinking that probably it is another scoping tool that IFS has launched recently and it seemed because your presentation is more complete from what we currently have. But for us, it is work in progress. So eventually we will have what you were showing. Thank you.

• Q: I just want to ask if you have you specifically have experience with the scope tool for construction and manufacturing sector, which is where we are. How does it run? Especially when you're migrating some of the key technologies.
• A: We've done this process with you guys in the past. And we're constantly working with other construction manufacturing customers to bring in typical benefits, typical improvements into our value packets. It's really good when you start off that discovery process. If you can look at an industry and say these are the typical benefit drivers that the industry is looking at. So that information is part of the accelerator to say even if we focused on these top ten benefit drivers, it's a really good starter for a business case and for making sure we've got the right initiatives in a success plan to move forward with.

• Q: Is this delivered through success the programme?
• A: So, there are some specific success services that you can use if you're a success customer to pick on.
• Q: What other ways is it delivered?
• A: We do it through presales. We encourage we do this activity through presales and then if you're a success customer you can then use success services to continue doing this work.
• Q: Can I ask why you prefer presales? I can see why you do it through success, but it seems you prefer doing it through presales.
• A: If you've got the opportunity through presales to do this is typically a team that's been taken aside in the organisation to say let's figure out how this digital transformation is going to work. That's a perfect opportunity for IFS to work with a customer doing presales to figure out what that to be landscape looks like. When you get into success, people then have started to go back into their day jobs. It's not always so easy to do that work. So, we typically find in success or post go live, we do small iterations. We look at one activity. During presales you can do that larger scope.
• Q: I was going to ask a version of it myself. Just to clarify the understanding. It can be leveraged in pre-sales to develop the business case and really get into the detail of what the organisation is looking to accomplish and how this particular investment will support that. Then the realisation piece is managed post sale by success. Is that the right way to describe it?
• A: Correct. And the beauty of doing through presales, why we like doing pre sales is when you go live you've got it all set up. If you haven't, we really encourage you do some work to identify the outcomes and it's hard to do. And those challenges are real. So by doing it early on the engagement you've got it ready for when you do go live.
• F: The only thing is that sometimes the business will ask what the return on investment is. I'm sure it’s just like you mentioned, it go back to what's the ROI. And as you said, you can have different levels of processes. We need to determine which one of the processes can easily be started off.
• R: How do we prioritise those processes right?
• R: I think that's the other benefit of the exercise is it forces you within your business and across the different stakeholders to get on the same page. Which sometimes that's part of the challenge where you can have different expectations or objectives, without even necessarily realising that. So going through this exercise helps really force to the surface any potential discrepancies and then have everyone align on what you really want to accomplish which is really important when it comes to driving the actual outcome. And to your point, when you don't do that work at the beginning, there's usually a reconciliation process that happens at some point where you ultimately end up doing it anyway.

• Q: What's popping up a lot in our businesses is all the E invoicing, tax integration in each of these globally. Do you have a good approach to that?
• A: So now that's part of that ESG work, the governance and compliance.
• F: Yes. So, like yeah, Europe, France, Belgium, Poland and we have Malaysia, Thailand, Australia. They're hard deadlines and we cannot just have the solution to upgrade cloud on all sites at the same time.
• R: Exactly. So, looking at that as a scope. Taking those business processes that are affected by those tax rules and by these legislations, looking at which areas we can focus on first. What is it we can do easily and what will have the impact and the complexity. They're quite important parts, quite important dimensions of the benefit. And being able to see which of those we could do in an order. What's really nice is we bring partners in on this as well. I always think of Pagero or something of that. They're so good at handling these types of things.
• F: Yeah, Pagero is a partner as well, but we also have other systems. So, we need to have also a global partner, which is not only Pagero. And the strategy could be we should use a partner or several partners and then we go to the specific Malaysia where you need to go live then we need to fix exactly your requirements. So, from this strategy, because we can take every account and do it, but maybe we can gain something by having a strategy from beginning.
• R: Yeah, precisely. And I talked about the enablers on the six box. So a strategic partner that can support us for the whole roll out. But technology partners, technology alliances, they're also key enablers to making this a success. They are key success factors aren't they. We can start to understand those early on. We need to involve a strategic partner to have a good roll out for this. We need a good technology alliance to make it happen. Very important.
• F: And not so many partners have experienced yet in this. It's coming and it's going on quite quickly. It's a short notice this comes up.
• R: Exactly. I'm sure you're all waiting for the CSRD as well.
• F: We're waiting for 25R2 as well.
• The changes to your scope three. So that's all coming as well. Your impact assessments and how can that be supported. That's going to be a strategic initiative for you guys coming up and for me, that's a long term correction. That's something we need to look at the as is, how can the as is landscape support things like compliance reporting, which are always changing.
• F: Today's presentation was good. It's a little bit as we're working today, maybe different wordings, maybe different boxes, but just emphasise on the governance that you have somebody who has the money who owns the problem and then make what we call it business model canvas. It's one slide where you need to have the cost and the benefits, and it's presented at the IT board 6 times a year to the management team. We are quite good. We have this circuit, and you need to be good business model. And we it we are supporting the business to prepare. We often denied the management and we are holding the hand to prepare this business model canvas from cost and savings, to security is one thing that need to be aligned infrastructure etcetera.
• R: Are you doing the post go live measuring?
• F: No, but that is something that we will start. Now we have put an owner on it. There needs to be a real owner that will follow up afterwards.

Next CollABoratives: 

• 13 February 2025 10:00 AM US ET / 15:00 GMT / 16:00 CET
  IFS Assets CollABorative: Tech Talk: Determining Repair v Replace
   
• 18 February 2025 10:00 AM US ET / 15:00 GMT / 16:00 CET
  IFS Service CollABorative: Tech Talk - PSO Super User Success Factors w/ Cubic Transportation and Konica Minolta 
   
• 20 February 2025 10:00 AM US ET / 15:00 GMT / 16:00 CET
  IFS Digitalization CollABorative: Think Tank - Data/Cybersecurity with Vaibs Kumar

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