Industrial and Financial Systems

Infobox_Company
company_name = Industrial and Financial Systems, IFS AB
company_
company_type = Public (OMXS: [http://www.se.omxgroup.com/stockinfo.aspx?stock=SSE995&isin=SE0000189946 IFS B] )
foundation = Linköping, Sweden (1983)
location = Linköping, Sweden
key_people = Alastair Sorbie, CEO
industry = Computer software
ERP
products = IFS Applications
revenue = $288 million USD (2005)
num_employees = 2,600 (2005)
homepage = [http://www.ifsworld.com www.ifsworld.com]

IFS AB was founded in 1983 to develop software that would manage business systems for the nuclear power industry. They produce components for product lifecycle management and enterprise resource planning for the mid-sized market, focusing on the manufacturing, technology and utility sectors. Their solutions are based on open standards to allow integration with other products.

History

*1983 - Foundation of IFS, Linköping, Sweden
*1985 - First Software-Release: IFS Maintenance
*1988 - IFS delivers an early version of IFS Applications for automotive
*1990 - First release of ERP-suite IFS Applications
*1991 - IFS expands to Norway and Finland
*1992 - IFS opens its 1st office outside Scandinavia in Poland
*1993 - Introduction of the 1st GUI for Windows. Expansion to Denmark and Malaysia1994 - Object-oriented technology enters IFS Applications
*1995 - Expansion to North America, Japan and Indonesia - IFS Applications is now component-based with a graphical user interface
*1996 - Listing on Stockholm stock exchange
*1997 - IFS establishes a software development center in Sri Lanka and expands to Great Britain, Germany, France, Brazil and Turkey. Launch of IFS Web client
*1998 - First offices in Hungary and Argentina
*1999 - IFS buys the US company EMS and expands to Greece - IFS is represented on all continents.
*2000 - Introduction of Java-based internet portals and mobile solutions. Expansion to Czech and Slovak.
*2001 - Expansion to China, Hong Kong und Russia
*2002 - IFS and IBM begin to develop the "next generation of mobile Business Applications". All components are available as web services
*2004 - NEC invests into IFS by buying 7.7% of IFS' share capital
*2005 - over 500,000 users of IFS Applications
*2007 - IFS announces its interface platform called Aurora. It is planned to be released in 2008.

Board of Directors

*Alastair Sorbie, President and CEO
*Håkan Zadler, Chief Financial Officer
*Thomas Petersson, Senior Vice President, Products R&D
*Cindy Jaudon, Area Manager, North America
*Fredrik vom Hofe, Vice President, Marketing & Industry Solutions
*Manni Svensson, Investor & Public Relations

Numbers and facts

* Customers: worldwide over 2,600 with about 528,000 IFS Applications users
* Branches: IFS has 79 branches in 44 countries
* Employees: about 500 employess
* Research and Development center is situated in Sri Lanka and Sweden. Most of the support for existing versions and the development work for future projects are done here.

Specific solutions for different industry sectors

Extensions and adaptions for different industry sectors normally are driven by requirements of customers.

* Aerospace & Defense
* Automotive
* Construction, Service & Facility Management
* High Tech
* Industrial Manufacturing
* Process Industries
* Utilities & Telecom

IFS Applications

IFS Applications is a fully integrated solution for enterprises and has over 60 different components. IFS Applications offers international support by default.

Some benefits of IFS Applications 7

* Over 60 individual purchasable business components
* One global release
* Online-Documentation
* Web-based Portal
* Scalable — from one to thousands of users
* Collaboration-Portal for users, customers and subcontractors
* 20 languages supported
* Used in over 60 countries

The 7th generation of the component-based software IFS Applications 7 — is completely based on the open Service Oriented Component Architecture (SOCA). It supports the complete management of product and service life cycle management from product development to different kinds of manufacturing processes and support of maintenance / service processes

Technology and architecture

Many extensions of the actual version have been developed customer-driven. IFS plans its software-architecture as evolutionary insomuch the investments in running installations of customers should remain secure. Through the use of open APIs (Application Program(ming) Interface) the modules comprising IFS Applications can integrate with other solutions and Open Source Products. Business logic is separated from the system core module, and standard solutions (e.g. reports and barcode applications) are preferred instead of proprietary solutions. IFS Foundation1 is strategic for a component based system, so IFS Applications 7 supports J2EE- and .Net as IBM WebSphere 6, Oracle AS 10g and JBoss 4.0 (the IFS middle tier or "IFS Extended Server" runs the latter for a default installation). Due to the support of Java Portal Standard (JSR-168), companies can access data and functions of IFS Applications directly from the IBM WebSphere Portal. The platform is based on open standards including UML, SQL, XML, J2EE and .NET and ships with tools for development, use, configuration, integration and administration of the system.

Restrictions and comparision to other products

A big difference to an ERP-system like SAP is that IFS Applications is delivered with preinstalled Web Services but no ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) - on the one side this can mean more effort for integration but on the other side the freedom of choice for any SOA or ESB solution.

The basic business processes in IFS Applications are set up with the installation. It is possible to control/vary the manual steps from beginning to the end of a process but there is no possibility to configure a template from scratch for very company individual processes. This means that the processes are not as flexible to configure in comparison to JD Edwards.

Because of the evolutionary development of IFS Applications there is no single integrated IDE for developers but a set of tools for e.g. the customization of vouchers, GUI and Server programming.

The majority of the business logic is implemented in PL/SQL, thus, IFS Applications can only be installed on an Oracle database.

The IFS Client (Centura Client, 2008) runs only on Windows - the Web Client on the other hand is OS independent.

External links

* [http://www.ifsworld.com IFS official site]