IFS Joins Parade to Make ERP Easier to Use

Echoing recent moves by SAP, Microsoft, Epicor, and other enterprise application software competitors, IFS AB today unveiled what it said is the first in a series of offerings that will give casual users an easy way to access ERP data using Microsoft Office applications such as Excel.
The new offering, Business Analytics, lets users tap into data from IFS's financial modules. Through the tool, users who may not have much experience with an ERP application can easily access and analyze financial data such as budget balances using the more familiar Excel program, said Rick Veague, IFS North America's chief technology officer.
"Until now, inexperienced users might have [had] to get help from the IT staff to extract financial data or learn to write reports themselves," said Veague in an interview with Managing Automation. "With Business Analytics, they can put their hands on this data with only a modest level of training."
IFS is not the only vendor of enterprise applications attempting to make its systems easier to use by employing Microsoft Office applications such as Excel as a familiar user interface. ERP market-share leader SAP has teamed with Microsoft Corp. to create Duet, a series of self-service applications that use Office programs such as Outlook, Excel, and Word as easy-to-use front ends. SAP and Microsoft recently announced an extension of their two-year-old partnership, including plans to add more business scenarios and integration with Microsoft's SharePoint Server portal product.
And Microsoft's Business Systems group in March unveiled the Dynamics Client for Microsoft Office and SharePoint, a Duet-like set of applications for Microsoft's Dynamics enterprise applications.
IFS's Business Analytics offering is different from Duet and the Dynamics Client for Microsoft Office and SharePoint, said Veague, because it provides users with a direct link to more real-time ERP data.
The Business Analytics offering is based on a smart client plug-in that IFS developed for Microsoft Excel and extensions to the metadata layer of IFS's applications. The metadata extensions provide Excel — through the plug-in — with context for the financial data in the IFS system. That allows the plug-in to respond when a user asks, for example, to see expense account balances.
In order to purchase the Business Analytics offering, customers must license and download the plug-in, Veague said. Cost of the offering was not available from IFS.
One advantage of the Business Analytics offering, he said, is that it links users directly into live financial data from the IFS ERP applications rather than requiring a separate data mart that may or may not be up to date.
The Business Analytics product has been in use in beta test mode at customer sites for the past six months. It is now generally available. The offering is just the first product in what IFS calls its Intelligent Desktop initiative. The company is now creating metadata extensions to supply chain, sales, and order fulfillment modules that will allow the company to create similar tools that let workers use Microsoft Excel to easily access data from other parts of the IFS system. IFS plans to release additional metadata extensions and tools enabling easily access to supply chain, order/fulfillment, and sales data beginning in the third quarter of this year, Veague said.