Takeaways from IFS World Conference 2019

Earlier this week, I attended the 2019 IFS world conference. The event provided an overview of company updates, featured an important announcement, and gave visibility into the product and market messaging roadmap for the business.

Below are my takeaways from the event:

IFS Acquires Astea

At the opening session of the event, Darren Roos, CEO of IFS, announced that the company has entered into an agreement to acquire Astea — another provider of service management solutions.

Considering Salesforce’s recent acquisition of Click Software in August 2019 and SAP’s acquisition of Coresystems in June 2018, the Astea acquisition marks further consolidation in the field service technology provider landscape.  Field service capabilities are increasingly incorporated into broader enterprise applications, such as CRM in the case of Salesforce and SAP, and ERP in the case of IFS and SAP. Native integration of those combined capabilities is ultimately designed to provide service leaders with a unified platform they can use to capture and use data to manage their business activities.

Astea has traditionally been strong in workforce management (WFM) activities — such as forecasting work orders, scheduling, and dispatching technicians — to address customer service needs. Astea has also added analytical capabilities to fine-tune these activities. In addition, it also provides various contact center capabilities such as routing, automated proactive notifications, and more.

Astea capabilities align with IFS’ Service Management solutions that also enable companies with service WFM capabilities as well as customer self-service and unified agent desktop. Besides gaining field service market share through this acquisition, IFS will now have an opportunity to sell its ERP solution to Astea users — providing an opportunity to further grow its market share in the ERP market.

For customers of both organizations, the success of this acquisition ultimately hinges on IFS’ ability to integrate Astea capabilities within its product portfolio. This is vital to address the trends influencing service leaders’ activities, such as artificial intelligence, automation, and Internet of Things (IoT).

Customer-First Cloud Strategy

One of the interesting discussions at the event was at the analyst track, where CEO Darren Roos noted that many current and potential customers aren’t initiating conversations asking for a cloud-based solution for ERP or field service.

Rather, he noted that service leaders the company works with aim to use technology to address specific business issues, including improving responsiveness to customer needs, increasing service reliability, decreasing cost and etc. As such, the company is following a customer-first approach. If the customers prefer to use an on-premises deployment model for their ERP or service management technologies, the company provides relevant capabilities instead of pushing strictly cloud-based solutions to its current and potential users.

This is important as while most CRM users have already migrated to the cloud, the migration in other spaces such as ERP, Service Management, and Contact Center has been slower — albeit steadily increasing. To this point, Roos noted that many IT and Service leaders understand the benefits of cloud technology in being able to scale up and down more easily based on activity volume, as well as gaining access to new features more easily and quickly. He clarified that while many leaders aim to enjoy these benefits, they want to do so without disrupting their existing business activities.

IoT

One of the other important topics discussed — during event sessions as well as one-on-ones with company executives and clients — was Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is utilized in various ways by both business-to-consumer (B2C) firms that provide devices such as smart thermostats, as well as business-to-business (B2B) firms that detect if a production equipment is likely to fail — and automatically dispatch a technician with the necessary parts to fix the issue before it impacts the manufacturing organization.

My impression from conversations at the event was that IoT capabilities are currently more likely to be used by service organizations in larger firms ($1 billion or more in annual revenue) while especially mid-market firms (those between $250 – $1 billion in annual revenue) are exploring ways they can utilize the technology to improve service delivery activities.

At the event, IFS announced that intelligence (referring to AI capabilities) and automation define the next phase of innovation in enterprise technology. To this point, enriching IoT activities by utilizing AI capabilities and automating activities by acting on IoT insights will ultimately help current and potential users of IoT reap greater benefits from the technology. Ultimately, this further increases the overall adoption across B2B and B2C firms.

Key Takeaways

The challenger model was emphasized repeatedly at the event. Various company executives highlighted that it’s important to challenge existing ways of doing business and current technology capabilities to further improve and drive innovation. These innovations in turn, help fuel cost reduction, customer satisfaction, and revenue growth.

Are you a field service leader aiming to balance efficiency with customer satisfaction? If so, how do the three pillars noted above align with your activities to challenge yourself as a business to achieve your goals? Please share your insights by commenting below.