Lessons Learned from IFS Go-Lives

By Richard Farrell

Senior Program Manager, Cuneiform

I still fondly recall my first ERP go-live.

At the time, I was a small cog in a large corporate machine. Our company was moving from spreadsheets, sticky notes, stone knives, and bear skins to a sophisticated ERP system. I joined a project team that spent more than a year and a half evaluating software, redesigning business processes, implementing the system, and preparing for go-live.

I remember what felt like a month of Sundays—late nights, early mornings, bad pizza, greasy burgers, and a BMI increase of at least five percent. By the end of the project, I was exhausted, a little heavier, and much wiser about what it takes to successfully transform a business.

Over the past two decades, I’ve participated in IFS implementations from nearly every seat at the table—consultant, IT leader, manufacturing executive, and executive sponsor. The IFS implementation best practices that follow come from those experiences. Some were learned the easy way. Most weren’t.

Building the Right Foundation

Project Governance

Sure, governance is a boring concept often championed by people in boring suits. Even so, it creates the accountability, responsibility, and decision-making authority every successful implementation requires.

Throughout my career, I’ve seen good implementations, bad implementations, and everything in between. The most successful projects all shared one characteristic: engaged executive leadership supported by a clear governance structure. A thoughtful project charter, a well-defined RACI, and regular Steering Committee meetings give an ERP project the attention it deserves. More importantly, they allow leadership to communicate the vision, remove roadblocks, and address potential issues before they become crises.

One final thought: if your Steering Committee only meets when something goes wrong, you don’t have governance—you have damage control.

Governance isn’t about creating bureaucracy. It’s about creating clarity. When everyone understands who makes decisions, how decisions are made, and what success looks like, projects move faster—not slower.

Business Before Software

Too many organizations focus on software configuration before deciding how they want the business to operate.

IFS is a powerful platform, but software rarely fixes broken business processes. An ERP implementation gives organizations a rare opportunity to improve the business—not simply automate yesterday’s problems.

Define your future-state business processes before discussing screens, workflows, reports, and configurations. Let your business processes drive system design—not the other way around.

Too often, companies ask, “How do we make IFS work like our current ERP?” A better question is, “How should our business operate going forward?”

Organizations that invest time in business process re-engineering early typically experience smoother implementations, stronger user adoption, and fewer surprises during go-live.

Executing the Implementation

Crawl, Walk, Run

It’s tempting during an IFS implementation to take advantage of every new feature the software offers. Resist that temptation.

Don’t measure a successful implementation by how many new capabilities you deploy on day one. Measure it by how successfully your organization adopts the new system while continuing to run the business.

Start by replacing your existing ERP and improving the business processes that matter most. Stabilize core operations, build user confidence, and help the organization become comfortable working in the new environment.

Once you’ve established that foundation, expand through a phased approach. Advanced Planning & Scheduling, AI, automation, analytics, mobile applications, IoT, and other innovations can deliver tremendous value—but only when the organization is ready to absorb them. A successful first go-live creates a stable operational foundation instead of trying to deliver every capability the platform offers.

The smoothest implementations I’ve experienced had one thing in common: the Steering Committee, Project Team, and Software Provider aligned on priorities, agreed on success criteria, and remained disciplined throughout the implementation.

That discipline matters because every additional report, integration, workflow, or business process change increases complexity and adds to the amount of organizational change your people must absorb.

Setting scope is only half the battle. Once implementation begins, defend it. Evaluate every new request based on business value, organizational readiness, and whether it truly belongs in the initial implementation or a future phase.

Remember, an ERP implementation isn’t the end of your digital transformation journey—it’s the beginning. Organizations that realize the greatest long-term value establish a solid operational foundation first, then continue building on it.

Modifications and Customizations

I firmly believe organizations should minimize changes to the core software.

Some ERP vendors call it customization. Others call it modification. I call it a last resort.

Every business is unique, and occasionally a customization makes sense. Too often, however, organizations customize software simply to preserve existing processes instead of improving them.

IFS Cloud’s greatest strength is the breadth of functionality available right out of the box. Every customization you carry forward becomes something you must document, test, support, and potentially revisit with every future update.

Every customization is a mortgage on your future upgrades.

Sometimes that mortgage is worth taking on—but make sure you’re buying genuine competitive advantage, not simply preserving yesterday’s way of doing business.

Identify every proposed customization early, evaluate it carefully, and require project leadership to approve it. Then ask one simple question:

“Does this customization make our business better, or does it simply make the new system behave like the old one?”

Challenge every customization. If the list keeps growing, stop and ask that question again. The answer usually tells you whether you’re improving the business—or simply recreating your legacy ERP.

Preparing for Go-Live

Test the Cutover, Not Just the Software

This is where go-lives truly live or die—and it’s the part most project plans shortchange.

Conference room pilots and User Acceptance Testing demonstrate that the software works. They don’t prove your business can run on it Monday morning. That requires rehearsing the cutover itself: the sequence, the timing, the data, the people, and the inevitable surprises.

A successful cutover doesn’t happen because everyone hopes it will. It happens because the team rehearses it repeatedly, validates every critical dependency, and knows exactly who is responsible for every step. Treat your cutover plan like a production process—not a project document.

Data Deserves Special Paranoia

This isn’t pessimism—it’s experience.

Plan multiple migration dry runs and validate the results with the people who know the data—not just the people who wrote the scripts.

Reconcile:

• Open customer orders
• Inventory balances
• Routings
• Bills of material
• Supplier information
• Production schedules
• Financial balances

Continue until the business confidently signs off on the results.

Nothing undermines confidence in a new ERP system faster than discovering on day one that inventory is wrong or customer orders failed to migrate correctly.

Before go-live, everyone should understand—and agree on—a go/no-go checklist with objective success criteria. If you don’t meet those criteria, delaying go-live is painful. Going live anyway is usually far more painful.

Communicate Early, Communicate Often

Do I really need to emphasize how important communication is to the success of an ERP project?

Clear, concise, and consistent communication manages expectations, aligns stakeholders, and guides the team through inevitable challenges. But simply telling people to “communicate more” isn’t particularly helpful.

Establish a single source of truth for issues, decisions, action items, and project status. Not three spreadsheets, two email chains, someone’s notebook, and a whiteboard in Conference Room B. One source. Visible to everyone. Reviewed consistently.

As go-live approaches, shorten the review cadence. During cutover, treat a daily stand-up as the minimum. Many organizations benefit from multiple checkpoints throughout the day.

Everyone should leave each meeting knowing:

• What was completed
• What remains open
• What is blocking progress
• Who owns the next action
• When it will be completed

Communication isn’t simply about sharing information. It’s about building confidence. When people understand what’s happening, why it’s happening, and who’s responsible, uncertainty fades—and projects move forward.

People Make the Difference

Change Management

An IFS implementation is a lot like a newborn—it needs lots of love and plenty of diaper changes.

It demands an all-hands effort that changes day-to-day operations, long-term strategy, and often company culture. Go-live represents a fundamental shift in how the business operates, affecting employees, customers, vendors, and business partners alike.

Effective change management is much more than a communication plan. Identify change champions within each department, give them early exposure to the system, and equip them to support their peers. Explain what is changing for each role, because “we’re getting a new ERP” means something very different to a buyer, a machinist, a planner, and a controller.

The more comfortable people become with the system before cutover, the smoother the landing afterward.

Successful implementations leave little room for silos, egos, sacred cows, or bad attitudes. The best organizations embrace change together because everyone is working toward the same objective—a stronger business.

The Karate Kid School of Training

Wax on. Wax off, Daniel-san.

Few movie scenes illustrate the value of preparation better than Mr. Miyagi’s training of Daniel-san in The Karate Kid. What appeared to be a simple chore was actually preparation for the moment those skills would matter most. Effective ERP training should follow the same philosophy.

Organizations often cut training short to recover time elsewhere in the project. Don’t. Training isn’t something you squeeze into the final week before go-live.

Give users multiple opportunities to work in the system, practice realistic business scenarios, and build confidence before cutover. Treat training as an investment in adoption, productivity, and long-term success—not a box to check.

Your end users may not literally get their keisters kicked during go-live, but they’ll certainly feel like they got speed-bagged if training is rushed.

The organizations that invest the most in training often discover they need the least support after go-live.

Drinking from the Keg of Glory

An IFS implementation takes a toll on motivation, family time, mental health, and life in general. Your project team will pour extraordinary effort into making the implementation successful.

Don’t let those sacrifices go unnoticed.

The people who carry an organization through a successful implementation deserve praise, appreciation, and recognition. Not everyone is coin-operated. Public recognition, leadership visibility, career opportunities, or simply hearing “thank you” from executive leadership often means more than a bonus.

Your project team has likely sacrificed evenings, weekends, vacations, and family time. Celebrate the milestone. Celebrate the people. And remember that success belongs to the entire organization—not just the project team.

Visible, meaningful recognition boosts morale and makes the next major initiative easier to tackle.

Alignment and Buy-In

Technology rarely determines the success of an ERP implementation. Organizational alignment does.

An ERP implementation touches nearly every part of the business. Operations, Finance, Supply Chain, Engineering, Sales, Customer Service, and IT all bring different priorities, perspectives, and definitions of success. That diversity is healthy. The challenge is turning those different perspectives into alignment around a common vision before difficult decisions arise.

Executive sponsorship, engaged business leaders, transparent decision-making, and open communication build trust throughout the organization. When people understand not only what decisions are being made, but why, buy-in increases dramatically.

The software doesn’t care which department requested a feature or whose process has existed for the last twenty years. The business succeeds when everyone works toward the same objective.

The strongest implementations I’ve experienced weren’t built on universal agreement. They succeeded because, once the organization made a decision, everyone aligned behind it and moved forward together.

Final Thoughts

A successful IFS go-live isn’t the finish line. It’s the starting line.

Organizations that view ERP as a business transformation—not simply a software implementation—consistently achieve better outcomes.

The fundamentals rarely change. Govern the project well. Crawl, walk, run. Challenge your business processes before configuring software. Test your cutover—not just your application. Train your people until they become confident. Communicate relentlessly. Celebrate your team. And never underestimate the value of experienced guidance.

Over the years, I’ve learned that successful implementations have very little to do with luck. They succeed because disciplined organizations make disciplined decisions, communicate effectively, stay focused on the business, and resist the temptation to do everything at once.

At Cuneiform, we believe successful IFS implementations begin with understanding the business—not just the software. Our team has led manufacturing operations, run IT organizations, sponsored ERP programs, and delivered IFS implementations. We’ve experienced the long nights, difficult decisions, and inevitable surprises that accompany every major transformation.

That perspective shapes every engagement. We focus on building a solid foundation, helping people embrace change, improving the business first, and then taking full advantage of everything IFS has to offer.

You can certainly earn all of your own scars. But if you’d rather learn from some of ours, we’d be happy to help.

And when your go-live is finally behind you, you just might find yourself drinking from that keg of glory.

Continue the Conversation

Every manufacturer’s journey is different. Whether you’re planning an IFS Cloud implementation, preparing for an upgrade, or looking to get more value from your existing environment, we’d be happy to share what we’ve learned.

If nothing else, perhaps we can help you avoid earning a few unnecessary scars of your own.

Let’s Talk. We’d love to continue the conversation

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