IFS Enhancement Program; Our Way Of Implementing IFS

IFS is a comprehensive enterprise software solution, favored by many giant corporations due to its extensive capabilities, flexibility, and consistency, which we’ve discussed in here. But as mentioned in that article, implementing IFS comes with its challenges and complexities.

At Dana Energy, every decision is made thorough research and consideration, aimed to help evolve and grow our organization. That is why, somewhere around the year 2009, after intensive benchmarking, researching and consulting, we decided to choose IFS as our ERP software. We believed IFS would help make our enterprise more agile, efficient and productive and also establish a systematic and process-driven method of thinking and collaborating throughout our organization. But as rewarding as it seemed, we knew of the many challenges that lied ahead of us. So we devised a detailed plan for every step of this journey and named it “IFS Enhancement Program”

We were determined to implement IFS, so we continued the process as planned. In 2012 we set up IFS in 5 of our companies, Dana Energy Holding, Dana Drilling, Dana Geophysics, Dana Petrorig and Dana Oil Services. One year later, in 2013, we put aside all parallel financial platforms and switched to IFS, and continued to establish IFS in other companies and operational sites. In 2014, while we continued our efforts in setting up IFS in more of our branches, Dana Systems was established. This company is solely focused on developing customized ERP, EAM, EPM, and RBI solutions based on our experience of localizing and implementing IFS in our enterprise. In 2015, along with re-engineering, we set up IFS in our Pakistan Geophysics branch. 2016 and 2017 were significant years for this program as we centralized our HR and financial systems through IFS, creating dashboards, and transferring operations to central corporate department. In 2018 and 2019, we created our HR development and business excellence unit to help improve IFS implementation process further.

Although most enterprises focus on financial and procurement aspects of IFS, this ERP solution has many more capabilities, and we’ve been dedicated to activate and utilize them. With over 45.000 man-hour work, either through research, education or operation, today, different activities such as contract management, service maintenance, document management, HR and payroll, are processed through IFS at Dana Energy. By the end of 2019, 55% of the IFS capabilities have been utilized in Dana Energy. Through our IFS enhancement program, this number will reach 90% by 2021 Q1.

Even though it’s typical to fail once or twice while implementing IFS and reverting to the previous ways and methods, through this long journey of dedication, hard work and endeavor, we have succeeded in implementing IFS without failure in an enterprise-wide scale. We are determined to continue this path tirelessly through our enhancement and upgrade programs.

This article was made possible by technical contributions from Ali Karimi and Mehrnoosh Ansari