Enterprise resource planning company IFS AB thrives on collaboration and customer success stories. The company works with clients to define the return that maps to their business, advocating that as the metrics for return on investment evolve, they should be defined by the customer.

“The very first question [you ask the customer] is, fundamentally, what are the business initiatives that you are trying to achieve with this potential change program?” said Matt Smith (pictured), global chief architect at IFS AB. “And then you have a deep discussion about what they need so … everybody really agrees firmly what we’re trying to achieve before you get anywhere near solution.”

Smith spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IFS World Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed how Business Value Engineering takes collaboration beyond a business case, the role data plays in the business value discussion, and how the IFS business philosophy differs from its competitors (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Vellante: Business Value Engineering is a concept that you’re a fan of and one that you’ve promoted and evolved. What is Business Value Engineering?

Smith: Business Value Engineering is a common term in the industry, but here at IFS it’s a little different. Fundamentally, it’s a collaborative process that we use, working with our customers and our partners to make sure that what we do with those customers delivers financial value to their business. So it’s fundamentally about making sure what we deliver delivers value.

Vellante: Your philosophy as a company seems to be let the customer define value. You’re not trying to impose a value equation on them. At the same time, it’s nice to be able to compare across companies or industries. So how do you sort of reconcile that?

Smith: Benchmarking across industry is really important, and there are lots of people that do that kind of work. And that’s part of Business Value Engineering. Fundamentally, it’s about mutual collaboration. So it’s not just about using the customer’s framework or their language; it’s about agreeing the language.

One of the challenges when you’re trying to build a business relationship with one or more parties is you have to have a common, shared understanding. A common vision, a common value system, so that when I say something to you it means the same thing when you say it to me. So part of that collaborative process requires that you work together, and Business Value Engineering facilitates that. It’s not just about producing a business case. It’s really more about the process and steps that you go through to get to that business case that allows you to establish trust and understanding and clarity.

Vellante: So how have you applied this methodology for your customers?

Smith: We’ve established a practice inside IFS. We’ve made sure that every country has the capability to do Business Value Engineering. We’ve hired some specialists, people who do this for a living. And we are working with lots and lots of customers now on this as a more methodical, disciplined approach.

But we’ve also recognized that we needed to measure our existing customers’ benefits. So what did our existing customer base achieve with our software? So we commissioned a pretty big and important study that was anonymous. We weren’t involved other than inviting the company to go and do this work, and then unleashing them on our customer base for six months, across all industries, all products, and asking them to go and find out and measure what our customers really achieve with the software.

Dave: In 2019, given all the discussion around data, digital transformation, AI, cloud, I would think that data plays a crucial role in these discussions. So what role does data play? Do companies understand the importance of data as it relates to the business value discussion?

Smith: Absolutely. I think that data-driven decision making is pretty fundamental. A lot of people say the numbers don’t lie; maybe some statistics might be bent, but numbers don’t really lie. So you’ve got to be able to capture numbers and make decisions based on those numbers.

I like to think, as a human being, the software is considerably less than half the game in any change program where you’re trying to achieve value. And the people, the human beings that are going to do the work, are the ones that are going to generate the value. The software’s a tool that you use, a very important tool, but it’s a tool. So you have to think about how do you build teams that can collaborate around value, achieve the value, measure the value, capture that data, but at the same time physically collaborate properly to do the work.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IFS World Conference. (* Disclosure: IFS AB sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IFS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE