The Polish production plant of the foundry Aludyne has implemented the IFS Cloud system in cooperation with InfoConsulting. It was a successful pilot project that provided an excellent base for potential roll-outs of the system in subsequent plants of the Aludyne corporation in Europe.
“The Aludyne facility in Bielsko Biała employs 220 people as part of an American foundry corporation. It produces primarily for the industrial and automotive sectors. In 2021, the Shiloh Group, to which the Polish plant belonged, joined the Aludyne Group, creating an entity with a total of USD 1 billion in revenue. We are a month after the implementation of the IFS Cloud system in the Bielsko-Biała plant,” said Paweł Świerczek, Director of IFS Connect Eastern Europe in Kraków production plant of Aludyne Poland.
“The Polish Aludyne plant has been using IFS systems in its operations since 2004. After the acquisition of Aludyne Poland by the Shiloh Group back in 2015, IFS 2003, an older version of the software was upgraded to IFS Applications 8.”
“Then, after the acquisition by Aludyne in 2022, it was decided that we would stay with IFS and implement the cloud version, and in May 2023 we reached our ‘go live’ goal. So far the phone is silent, I’m not at the plant, so I guess it’s good” – said the director of Aludyne Poland.
Why IFS Cloud?
“We knew that IFS Cloud would open up a range of possibilities, and the transition would give us the same user experience as the previous version. Also, for my part, I lobbied internally that we should implement it as an enterprise-wide solution. We took advantage of the fact that the corporation does not have defined system preferences for the whole of Europe and I am now working to have IFS Cloud introduced in other locations,” added the director of Aludyne Poland.
He noted that the goal of Aludyne Poland is the optimal use of this innovative solution to strengthen the development potential of its production facility and help meet customer demands.
“IFS Cloud offers an evergreen solution. This is a good asset for companies that have a lifecycle of upgrades. Evergreen is a solution that is a really strong aspect when choosing IFS Cloud.
In addition, being a local plant that lost all of its IFS experts (these were colleagues from Scandinavia) after the acquisition by Aludyne, looking for a system we searched the market and had good reports about IFS Polska as well as InfoConsulting. As a result, we decided to upgrade, in cooperation with InfoConsulting, although it was a new product for us” – said the director of Aludyne.
InfoConsulting is a company specializing in IFS system implementations. “We are a global partner, which is confirmed by the awards we receive every year from IFS, including the most important one for us, i.e. Customers’ Choice,” said Adam Domagała, Head of PMO, InfoConsulting.
Adam Domagała pointed out that from the perspective of the implementation team, InfoConsulting always asks the questions: who, how, and what. What challenges will need to be overcome to implement the next project?
“It seems quite trivial, but when approaching each project, we first build an implementation team, both on our side and on the client’s side. We decide what methodology and tools we will use during the implementation of such a project to effectively lead to the final result in the form of a fully launched and properly operating system,” Adam Domagała pointed out.
InfoConsulting has been operating for over 20 years and has implemented projects for over 200 clients. This is achieved with a dedicated team of 250 InfoConsulting staff from branches around the world.
“We are currently running several IFS Cloud implementations in Poland. In addition, we are constantly rolling out current systems (version 9 or 10) for subsequent clients and companies. From the perspective of the last 6 months, we have successfully completed and launched 7 implementation projects, including of course Aludyne” – said the Head of PMO InfoConsulting.
Aludyne Poland Project
As part of these launches, InfoConsulting supported 11 companies in 17 different geographical locations and helped them with a full production launch.
“Those who have experienced a production launch know the commitment it requires on both sides. Starting the Aludyne project, the first thing that came to our mind was thinking it would be a typical technical upgrade from the previous to the next version. Nothing could be more wrong. We assumed maintaining data continuity, minimizing risks, and a very short implementation path would be the situation, but after confirming the scope, it turned out that we had difficulties with access to previous environments. This meant we had to adapt our methodology by building a kind of hybrid, to make sure the project had a positive finale. The changes concerned meant we had to use the full possibilities of IFS Cloud, which we managed successfully together with Aludyne Poland,” points out Adam Domagała.
In the opinion of the Head of PMO at InfoConsulting, a very important element that allowed the launch of the Aludyne project within 4 months, was the confirmation of the scope/definition and the analysis of the possibility of this upgrade being successful. (The start of work on the configuration
environment for production started on May 1)
“After this analysis, we went through 2 pre-production upgrades. This was also quite a unique situation considering the previous tech upgrades. We did this to minimize the risk of failure of IFS Cloud BI communication with the outside world. We made a series of functional modifications in every area: from finance through production, distribution, and changes in mobile processes and their reporting, plus localization to the Polish market in terms of sales and finance using defined objects, events, or reporting” – said the director of InfoConsulting.
He noted that in the background, the implementation team at InfoConsulting provided database and technical engineers who watched every step before, during, and after “go live”.
“As it turned out, these background checks could be safely turned off after 2 weeks, because it turned out that the database environment was perfectly stable. If there were problems, it was usually caused by the Aludyne facilities, but here, any consultant of a given area could engineer a solution. As a result, we are after the production and handover of the project to the client is complete. We have plans to use our Center of Excellence services, application development training, and additional facilities, and we work to support the Aludyne team in terms of our Managed Services in relation to database administration support of the IFS Cloud environment,” Adam Domagała said.
Director of Aludyne, Paweł Świerczek, pointed out that the company does not have any external experts on the IFS system.
“And at the same time, we are a pilot project as far as the corporation is concerned. Therefore, we assume cooperation with InfoConsulting, based on their Center of Excellence.
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