AI needs to go perfectly in-hand with good data quality

Jonaid Bhatti pic

Jonaid Bhatti is a unicorn in the world of IFS. He’s a Chartered Accountant specialising in the deployment of IFS Finance and Projects. He’s skilled in working with people from different cultural backgrounds, and across international legal requirements. He’s an independent, currently working through Gtech on the biggest, global IFS implementation.

Jonaid took time out from running Finance & Projects support for SBM Offshore to talk to us about AI, CRIMs in finance, and why togetherness is key to IFS implementations.

How did you go from being an Accountant to an IFS Functional Consultant specialising in Finance and Projects?

A lot of finance consultants aren’t accountants by trade, there are some but not many. I first came across IFS when I was working at IMI and they were deploying IFS Apps 9 to all their sites around the world. I’d been working as a Systems Accountant in a group function, using IBM packages like Cognos and TM1.  I was working on financial efficiencies, looking to improve the IT systems. There was an element of training, quite often I was sent to a site and told to train people up on a system that I had never seen before. I had a lot of practice in quickly figuring out how things work and understanding the problems people have.  I enjoyed helping people get fully connected, training them, and seeing them get the value from the system. 

You’ve worked all around the world, what are your impressions of different work cultures?

One thing I saw in Shanghai that impressed me was the togetherness. On the site they were doing a lot of manufacturing. You’d see people from the shop floor coming up to the finance area to talk, and there was an ease and a familiarity in how people communicated. If the finance team wanted to check an invoice they didn’t email the manager. They’d go down and ask, did you actually receive the parts? 

It was very similar in Italy, everyone was walking around and talking to each other. Everyone knew who their customers were, what was being manufactured for who, and there was a universal sense of pride when a job was completed and the invoice was paid. 

Why is the sense of togetherness so important in working with IFS?

An ERP system gives interconnectivity between departments and adds efficiencies to the business as a whole. People lose sight of this, especially when one of their workflows changes and takes them, say, two minutes longer to do. They don’t see it has increased efficiency upstream and downstream. When everyone has the overall business value in mind there is less resistance to adopting the new ways of working, and more appetite for change and improvement. 

Where are you working at the moment?

I’m working on one of the biggest IFS implementations in the world at SBM Offshore. I don’t know if it’s the biggest ever, but I think at the moment it’s one of the largest in terms of the size, and the number of countries and sites involved. 

My current role is a bit different to what I normally do. I’m usually on the ground, training users, but in this role I’m running the support team for Finance and Projects. When I joined they had gone live in Brazil, and now they’ve gone live in Guyana and Angola as well. 

Is the finance module the most important one in an IFS implementation?

There’s a saying in IFS that all roads lead to finance. Any transaction that goes into an ERP, it always gets to finance. It generally goes live last because businesses will want to bring aboard Supply Chain or manufacturing first, as they’re at the start of the information flow. IFS is quite forgiving in that, if something breaks from the Supply Chain side, you can fix it later in terms of the feed to finance.

As a functional consultant it’s useful for me to almost be a Jack of All Trades and learn from the other departments, so when there is a problem I’m able to know where it originated. Since I started working with IFS I’ve grown to learn Projects, and develop a good working knowledge of Supply Chain too. Although I try to stay away from it! Supply Chain has its own intricacies and when dealing with large scale implementations, tasks such as inventory counts can get difficult when trying to tie back to expected finance totals. Quite often businesses treat going live into a new system as a bit of a company audit and all those numbers will feed into finance. 

How do you feel about customisations in IFS finance?

A lot of companies don’t take the cost / benefit of CRIMs into account. (CRIMs stands for Configuration, Report, Integration, Modification. This acronym is used as a collective noun for the different ways the standard IFS system can be tailored to your business processes.) With the number of consultants and employees involved in successfully specifying and implementing a CRIM, based on hourly/daily costs of everyone involved it could, for example, cost £10,000 but only provide £1,000 worth of time saving a year.

Businesses need to think about where their competitive advantage is. If you’re a manufacturing business, your financial processes generally won’t be giving you a competitive edge. It’s about understanding where your business value comes from, and which processes are key. 

What’s the first thing you do when you join a new team?

Whenever I do a new deployment, one of the first things I do is ask, what are your legal requirements? This might not seem like an issue if you are based in the UK, working on projects in the UK, but having done international deployments, there are specific tax rules, especially in places like Italy, Brazil, China. 

So the first thing I do is make sure we’re happy with that, and that we’re able to meet the legal requirements without too much customisation. And then the next step is understanding what management wants in terms of their reporting. Those are the big two. Once you have those you can make sure the information from supply chain, projects, and manufacturing is feeding in correctly. 

What are your thoughts on AI?

There have been murmurs of AI in the finance space for a long time, though under different names. IFS has a great module called Preventive Maintenance which is an element of AI for example. In terms of language models such as ChatGPT, IBM had a system ten years ago called IBM Watson which was a language model they’ve integrated into the Cognos reporting suite, and that’s what the AI that everyone usually sees. 

AI needs to go perfectly in-hand with good data quality in the system

In theory you can train AI to automate analysis of financial reports, but it’s only useful if the information is standardised and accurate. When you rely too heavily on a rules-based system and your data is poor, it will pull in issues. I often have to fix problems caused by rules-based data migration. At the moment you still need a human critical eye to ensure it actually makes sense.

At the moment I can’t see AI causing a sea change in finance space, it will be incremental – building on what advancements have been occurring over the last decade. There is always going to be change in this environment, like PowerBI was an incremental change, and a good one. You definitely see a massive reporting improvement between IFS Apps 9 and 10, and now Cloud has a lot more functionality coming in. The old reporting in IFS was manual and the plug-ins were clunky. The connection to PowerBI is the biggest improvement for finance for IFS recently.

What’s your advice to companies who are looking to implement IFS?

Building quality and experienced deployment teams is key to a successful deployment, especially to get it right first time. With the success of IFS, a lot of new consultancies have shifted their focus from other ERPs to IFS. Though there are a lot of similarities between IFS and its ERP competitors, IFS is unique and you need people with deep technical expertise and experience working with the product. Because of this, it’s often better to go with a consultancy company that specialises in IFS deployments such as GTech. In the long term this will save time and money.

Additionally, the term “But that’s how we used to do it in the SAP/SUN/Oracle/x” should be banned! IFS does do certain tasks differently to how other ERPs work but rather than modifying IFS to get it to work the same way as before, embrace the change and stick to the standard solution as much as possible. Doing so allows for easier future upgrades and onboarding new employees, who have IFS experience, quicker as they don’t need to understand all the customisations put in to match the old system.

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