IFS Cloud Platform Architecture

By using a people-centric design, we tap into the experience and knowledge your teams already have of using consumer software, apps, and services. It means that people who know the business don’t need to spend time learning the application.

Browser-based for employees and B2B

IFS Aurena is the main user experience for IFS Cloud. Using progressive and responsive web technologies, our intuitive, browser-based interface runs comfortably on any device: from mobile and tablet to multi-screen desktop. Pages adapt automatically to the screen size and type of device used.

Apps on Android, iOS and Windows

The browser-based experience is complemented with offline-capable apps built on IFS Aurena Native—our cross platform mobile capability that delivers apps across Android, iOS and Windows devices.

IFS Aurena Native apps and IFS Aurena itself can be configured to reflect your brand, colors, and logos.

Augmented reality

Both IFS Aurena and IFS Aurena Native apps feature built-in augmented reality capabilities that provide remote assistance, for example to field workers. The capabilities augment live video chat, letting you point-and-show, draw and more on the live feed.

Chat bot

Through messaging channels like Microsoft Teams and IFS Aurena itself, IFS Aurena Bot lets you complete specific tasks in a conversational way—using natural language, text or voice.

Office add-ins

Sometimes the best experience is the one provided from within another application, while still accessing data and functionality in IFS Cloud. Our platform offers add-in experiences, like the IFS CRM add-in for Microsoft Outlook and IFS Business Reporter add-in for Microsoft Excel.

Modern user authentication

Regardless of how you access IFS Cloud, authentication and single-sign-on is performed using OpenID Connect and your choice of identity provider, including Azure AD, Okta, PingIdentity and more. Access to APIs, from clients that can’t present a sign-in UI, can be achieved using oAuth2.

As well as broad and deep out-of-the-box capabilities, our solutions offer extensive scope for tailoring. For example, IFS Cloud lets you tailor the user interface and process automation so you can optimize it for your business and ways of working.

We recognize the most accessible way to tailor is through configuration, and we support this with intuitive ‘designers’ rather than developer-focused environments that require highly specialist skills. Along with these, the IFS Cloud platform is built from the ground up to help you connect to other external software, data and platforms, or perform more traditional customization using our developer tools.

Lobby and Page Designers

Presenting the right information and options to users is one of the most powerful ways to make work more effective, efficient, and fun. With our Lobby Designer, you can configure exactly what information is shown at-a-glance to users. The Page Designer lets you add, move, hide and rearrange UI elements on pages to fit exactly how you work.

Workflow Designer

Reduce manual work and automate business processes with the built-in Workflow Designer. With simple drag-and-drop configuration, you can pick up on any business event and automate additional tasks—calling on our APIs, user input, machine learning and external systems.

Extensible data model

Extend IFS Cloud’s data model through configuration: add new attributes, new relationships, and even entirely new entities. Place added attributes as fields on pages, in report layouts, and expose them through our APIs.

APIs to extend on the outside

Access IFS Cloud from within other applications, like Office365. Build new experiences using low-code tools, such as PowerApps and OutSystems. Develop a custom front end. Configure “punch-out” links and commands in the user interface, and much more.
All these scenarios are not just possible, but easy and straightforward, thanks to our standards-based RESTful APIs and our API Explorer.

Extend in layers with IFS Developer Studio

In addition to our extensive configuration capabilities, which will handle most of your tailoring needs, you can make code level extensions in IFS Developer Studio. Such additions and extensions are kept in a separate code layer to minimize the impact of carrying them forward across future updates to IFS Cloud.

Integrating new technologies so they bring value to real-world business and processes is a challenge, which is why we are providing advanced AI, automation, and optimization capabilities as services within our platform. That way, we can leverage them across the IFS Cloud solution in a way that becomes practical and affordable for our customers.

Scheduling optimization

Optimization involves complex situations with many variables and constraints. For example, the challenge in field service is to determine who should go where and do what when. With just 100 jobs done by 20 people, there are 10179 possible plans and continuously changing circumstances as the day progresses, so optimization needs to involve more than just brute force searching.

Our world-leading scheduling optimization engine solves such dynamically-changing problems using a combination of local search, clustering, what-if simulation, and simulated annealing. The hierarchy of algorithms includes evolutionary computing techniques such as genetic algorithms. In addition, our scheduling engine uses AI to automate the process of algorithm selection, tuning and exploring the algorithm parameters to choose the best combination of algorithms for a given problem.

Machine Learning (ML) service

Since machine learning (ML) allows systems to learn and adjust their actions without human assistance, it’s an important capability to serve defined business processes as well as intelligent process automation.

Our machine learning service provides a complete ML pipeline that automates data preparation, training and deployment, removing the work typically done by a data scientist. The result is that the value of machine learning can be realized by business users as well as embodied in out-of-the-box automation bundles such as sales opportunity qualification.

The ML service supports both pre-trained (e.g. by us, using available industry data) as well as bespoke models (e.g. opportunity qualification) where the machine learning model is trained, tuned and validated on your own data in order to capture the complexities and nuances of decisions unique to your business.

Business Process Automation (BPA)

Automating business processes reduces manual work and often leads to increased quality through consistent and timely execution of these processes. Our platform enables BPA through the use of events to initiate automation and with our Workflow Designer to configure the automation flow. Automation can be initiated from pre-defined events, the event of any status or change to any object, or from action events when users do something—regardless of whether that results in a data change.

Analytics to provide awareness and decision-making support needs to be available when and where people work. For many it’s about having that at-a-glance awareness in the context of their daily tasks. For others it’s about line of business reporting or slicing and dicing years’ worth of data to explore insights. And for all: it’s about having easy access to information and smart ways to visualize, analyze, report and present it.

Lobbies – at a glance

Lobbies can be tailored to individual needs, providing you with an at-a-glance view of the information and actions that matter most to your role.

IFS Business Reporter

As an add-in to Microsoft Excel, IFS Business Reporter is the perfect tool for business reporting and, thanks to write-back support, it’s ideal for business planning. Design reports using all your favorite Excel features, run them against live data, write back changes (to a budget forecast, for example), knowing your data will always be kept safe and under control in IFS Cloud.

In-memory analysis models

Benefit from our ready-to use in-memory analysis models, each containing the measures and dimensions you need to analyze decades of data. Tailor existing models or create entirely new ones. And since our analysis models are implemented as tabular models, you can use virtually any reporting or analytics front end you want.

PowerBI

Tap into PowerBI’s full power and vibrant eco-system to design reports against our Analysis Models, or directly against live data. Embed PowerBI reports directly in the IFS Aurena user experience, with the ability to drill through from report elements to pages in IFS Cloud for further details and analysis.

Operational reporting

Design and print operational reports such as order confirmations, invoices, and labels. Our operational printing tools and engine support pixel perfect layouts, barcodes, PDF creation, and detailed control of printer settings.

IFS Cloud comes with innovation embedded for real-life industry scenarios. But we understand that as a customer you might want to add and connect your own innovations as well. Which is why it’s built for openness too, so you can take things further—connecting your own innovations, applications and processes to the data and functionality within IFS Cloud. By providing the openness and APIs you need, IFS Cloud lets you innovate more easily and achieve digital transformation faster.

100% open RESTFul APIs

In an increasingly connected and automated world, complete API coverage is vital. Whether it’s integrating data and processes between different applications, extending your application on the outside, or automating activities, APIs are key.

IFS Cloud includes a complete set of open APIs, covering all data and every process. The platform exposes these as OData RESTful APIs, complete with OpenAPI (formerly Swagger) specifications. In addition, our platform provides useful tools such as the built-in API Explorer that lets developers search for APIs, review API documentation, and configure API access.

Events and process automation

To create integration and automation—whether within an application or across applications—the business event initiating the process flow must be captured.

IFS Cloud comes with a range of useful pre-defined business events, and you can configure your own events—to use for performing simple actions (e.g. send an e-mail) or initiating integration and automation flows. You can configure events to fire on any entity creation, data change, state change, or from actions performed by users that don’t result in a data change.

Boomi partnership

Our platform has built-in capabilities for direct API access and process automation, along with message queueing and routing through IFS Connect. But you can also orchestrate more complex integration scenarios through external integration platforms. Our partnership with—and pre-built connectors for—Boomi iPaaS is a strong example of this. And thanks to the full coverage of open APIs, IFS Cloud works comfortably with most integration platforms.

Choose whether to run IFS Cloud in our cloud service, or operate the application software in a different way, including on-premise. You can select from three different deployment models, and thanks to our containerized architecture, receive the same IFS Cloud software for each one. What’s more, our platform lets you move from one model to another, should business requirements or legislation change.

Cloud

We provide IFS Cloud as a service to you from our cloud—connect to the service, and we take care of the rest.

Remote

We supply a pre-packaged “virtual appliance” with IFS Cloud software, which you operate together with the main database, on supported platform software, with choice of data residency.

Self-managed

We provide the various software artifacts (e.g. containers, database scripts) that make up IFS Cloud to you, so you can install and operate it yourself, with choice of data residency.

As part of our overall customer experience, IFS Lifecycle Experience provides the elements you need to manage your IFS Cloud solution through its entire application lifecycle—from initial development, through years of usage and updates, to new releases. You are in control, inviting IFS or IFS partners to perform work on your solution.

Lifecycle experience portal

Your self-service entry to manage your solution. The lifecycle experience portal lets you create your build place, apply service updates and releases, and much more.

Build place and automation

Contains everything you need to build your solution. The build place lets you access IFS Cloud releases and service updates and contains the solution repository, which stores any tailoring or extension development. The build place also provides DEV and QA environments along with automated build pipelines that perform continuous integration and delivery.

Developer portal

Provides you with development tools, documentation, and automated tool updates.