Built to Adapt in a Changing World
Seven years ago, AirBoss began a sustained focus on digital transformation. For a company that manufactures more than 40,000 custom rubber compounds for automotive and defense customers, managing thousands of formulations, raw materials, and production schedules across facilities in Canada and the United States is inherently complex.
That complexity has been amplified by external conditions that have rarely stabilized. Supply chains splintered during the pandemic. Freight costs became unpredictable. Customer demand shifted without warning, with some ramping up and others going offline. Tariffs have since added further pressure. "We have to be able to evolve very quickly at a much faster pace than we've ever had to in the past," says Jack Bergman, Vice President of IT at AirBoss. That imperative shaped every major technology decision the company has made, including the move to IFS Cloud.
From Apps 10 to IFS Cloud
The upgrade from IFS Applications 10 to IFS Cloud came with overlapping technical unknowns that needed to be resolved in parallel. The most immediate was reporting: how it worked in Apps 10 was changing in IFS Cloud, and for a business that relies on data to make decisions about production allocation, supply chain management, and inventory optimization, this was a potential showstopper.
There was also a question around the custom applications AirBoss had built in-house using the IFS API. These apps gave shop-floor operators an intuitive interface while keeping all data within IFS’s central repository. A major redevelopment would have added cost and time to an already complex upgrade.
Both were resolved with the support of IFS Success. On reporting, the team stepped in with options, recommendations, and a clear path forward, significantly reducing the time it took to move past the issue. On the API migration, the transition proved far smoother than feared: "The uplift was very straightforward," says Bergman.
IFS Success also proved critical when AirBoss began bringing a new business entity into IFS — one that required drop-shipping, a process the internal team had no prior experience configuring. "IFS Success was pivotal. We went to them and said we've never done anything with drop shipping before. They put us in touch with someone who's an expert within IFS on the drop shipping module and showed us how it worked, the best practices, and some of the pitfalls organizations face when trying to implement this for the first time."
Expert Access as a Strategic Advantage
AirBoss maintains an in-house team of IFS specialists who manage the system day to day, drive adoption across the business, and oversee ongoing implementations. But no internal team can hold deep expertise in every part of a modern enterprise platform. That is precisely where IFS Success has proved its worth.
"The most valuable element is getting access to true experts," says Bergman. "With IFS Success, everyone we talk with, they're the person inside IFS who works on that module or that part of the system." That directness removes the uncertainty that can come from working with generalist consultants, and gives the AirBoss team confidence that advice is grounded, current, and specific to their situation.
In practice, AirBoss uses IFS Success to review targeted operational areas, such as scheduling efficiency, on-time delivery, new module adoption, and receive practical guidance on where and how to improve. If scheduling becomes a priority, they engage IFS Success for a structured review of current processes. If on-time delivery needs attention, they seek recommendations on the data and tools that could support better decisions on the shop floor. It is a structured, repeatable model for continuous improvement. IFS Success is the mechanism that bridges the gap between current usage and the full value the platform can deliver. As Bergman summarizes: "That's something that we don't have to worry about anymore. That I think is the biggest driver of value from the IFS Success program."
Delivered Ahead of Time and Under Budget
The IFS Cloud upgrade was completed six months ahead of schedule and 37% under budget. Users responded positively to the new interface; some began requesting additional functionality, a sign that adoption had gone beyond compliance to genuine engagement with the new platform.
One of the most tangible improvements has been in reporting. Users who previously extracted data from IFS into Power BI, or assembled results manually in spreadsheets, can now access the same information directly through dashboards embedded in the Aurena interface. "They don't have to bounce between systems anymore," says Bergman. Reports are built into the ERP layer, visible where decisions are made, and interactive enough for users to explore the underlying data without leaving the environment they work in.
The shift to a cloud architecture also resolved a persistent maintenance burden. Staying current with IFS Cloud’s continuous release cycle removes the need for high-effort platform uplifts every few years, freeing IT resources for improvements that actually move the business forward. "Hearing that we no longer have to do these massive uplifts every couple of years means less downtime for implementing new features that drive better value out of the system," says Bergman.
With the upgrade behind it, AirBoss entered the second year of its IFS Success partnership with a different focus. The first year was devoted largely to making the cloud transition as smooth as possible. The second is about optimizing the business: examining manufacturing processes, identifying where more value can be extracted from IFS Cloud, and making sure the platform is working as hard as the business needs it to.
What Comes Next for AirBoss
AirBoss has IFS Cloud implementation underway at four new business entities, with a larger implementation to follow. The consistency of that expansion reflects a consistent evaluation outcome: every time AirBoss assesses whether IFS Cloud is the right fit for a new facility, the answer confirms it.
With the upgrade program well advanced, attention is turning to optimization. Scheduling is the priority: sequencing production runs correctly across multiple plants, accommodating rush orders, and accounting for the shelf-life constraints that make timing so consequential in rubber manufacturing. "Optimizing how we do our scheduling is one of the most critical aspects to maintaining an efficient manufacturing operation," says Bergman. IFS Success will be the vehicle for that engagement: a structured review of current processes, followed by targeted improvements.
Further ahead, AirBoss is exploring the AI capabilities built natively into IFS Cloud, including IFS Loops. The initial area of interest is recipe management, the highly variable process of producing rubber batches, where temperature, mixing time, ingredient injection, and dozens of other factors interact differently from one run to the next.
The appeal is straightforward: AI tools that operate where the data already lives, without requiring a separate integration effort to make them useful. "That's a big part of the Moment of Service with IFS — how do we make sure people have both the material and the data they need at the right time, to make the right decisions, for both our internal organization and our customers."
