Extend Your IFS ERP With Mendix: Innovate Without the Risk

IFS Cloud is a robust Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform designed to manage essential business functions—from finance and inventory to manufacturing and supply chain operations. While it offers a strong foundation, making direct changes to it often does more harm than good. Manual customization risks breaking future upgrades and ends up increasing your IT team's backlog of requested features.

Fortunately, keeping pace with growth and adopting new technologies doesn’t require replacing your ERP or taking unnecessary risks. By extending your IFS system with Mendix low code development, you can quickly add a flexible layer on top, enhancing functionality without disrupting the stability of your core systems.

Short on Time? Here's a Brief Overview

• Preserve your investment: You can keep your stable IFS Cloud system for essential business operations while adding new capabilities.

• Speed up innovation: You can build new features in weeks instead of months with visual development tools.

• Reduce development costs: Create custom applications without expensive specialized programmers.

• Connect everyone: Give employees, customers, and suppliers intuitive access to your ERP data.

• Protect your upgrade path: You can add functionality without modifying your core ERP system.

The Innovation Bottleneck: Why ERP Alone Can't Keep Up

ERP systems are great for standardized processes like accounting, inventory management, and order processing, but this standardization makes rapid change difficult.

Customization problems

Organizations running IFS often find themselves weighing the benefits of new functionality against the risks and costs of customization. Customize your ERP directly, and you can face several practical problems:

• Direct code modifications often break during system upgrades.

• Each customization requires specialized developers who charge premium rates.

• The more you customize, the harder future changes become.

• Testing and quality assurance consume significant resources.

IT backlogs delay critical business capabilities

Your business constantly evolves, and technological requirements only get more complex. For instance, sales teams request mobile apps for field representatives, operations departments need enhanced reporting dashboards, and finance requires specialized approval workflows. Every request joins an ever-growing queue that your IT department must try to address even while maintaining existing systems.

When organizations lack effective ways to handle these needs, departments often create independent solutions, such as stand-alone spreadsheets, isolated databases, or unauthorized shadow systems. Such fragmentation creates inconsistent data, wastes time, duplicates efforts, and increases error rates throughout your organization.

What Is Mendix and How Does It Work Alongside IFS?

Mendix is a low code development platform—a visual environment where you build applications by dragging and dropping elements instead of writing thousands of lines of code. The platform transforms complex programming into visual design, making application development more accessible to a wider audience across your organization.

Let’s see how it would work in a real-word example. Creating a customer portal with Mendix would typically involve:

• Visually designing screens by dragging elements like tables and buttons.

• Connecting these screens to your data using point-and-click tools.

• Adding logic with visual flowcharts instead of complex programming.

• Testing and deploying with built-in tools that handle technical details automatically.

With IFS, Mendix works as an extension layer that connects through secure APIs (application programming interfaces—essentially code that lets systems share information). This allows your extensions to leverage IFS Cloud's Industrial AI features, bringing advanced analytics and intelligent automation into your business workflows. 

The result? Create modular, composable applications that can be quickly adapted as needs change.

For example, you can maintain customer master data in IFS but use a Mendix application where sales representatives update contact information and view order history on their tablets. The information stays synchronized automatically, without duplicate data entry.

Use Cases: How Organizations Extend IFS With Mendix

Companies in manufacturing, retail, energy, and financial industries use Mendix to enhance their IFS systems in various ways without disrupting core stability.

1. Self-service portals

Many businesses need to give external partners access to ERP data. Mendix excels at creating intuitive portals for vendors, customers, and field personnel.

Optime Subsea, a provider of subsea oil and gas technology, added a supplier portal that transformed its vendor relationships. Before implementation, suppliers had to call or email to check order statuses, delivery dates, and invoicing information—creating bottlenecks and delays. Its new portal gives suppliers direct access to real-time data from IFS.

2. Mobile workforce solutions

Field service management works better when mobile apps connect technicians with your ERP. Mendix applications let field teams access work orders, update job statuses, and record time—even offline.

VodafoneZiggo, a Dutch telecommunications provider, had technicians complaining about juggling multiple systems during service calls. Its new application integrates data from multiple systems into one unified mobile tool. With technicians saving an average of 10 minutes per truck roll, VodafoneZiggo has seen significant efficiency gains.

3. Process automation and workflow

IFS offers standard workflows, but companies often require custom approval sequences or specialized notifications. Mendix can handle these unique workflows while keeping transactions in the ERP.

Firms like Marzek Kner have seen improvements in on-time delivery rates when using Mendix. It achieved 98% on-time delivery (up from 60%) and a 77% reduction in the time it takes to handle complaints.

4. Legacy application replacement

Many IFS customers have older applications alongside their ERP. These aging systems often create problems due to outdated technology and high maintenance costs. Mendix applications can replace these systems while connecting smoothly with IFS. This digital transformation strategy focuses on step-by-step modernization rather than replacing everything at once.

Integration and Governance: IT Still in Control

For IT leaders worried about system sprawl and security risks, Mendix offers governance features that maintain central control while enabling broader development capabilities.

Security and access control

Mendix applications integrate with your existing security infrastructure through multiple layers of protection. For instance, single sign-on seamlessly connects with your identity providers, while row-level security and role-based permissions ensure that users access only the appropriate data. Additionally, comprehensive audit logging tracks all system activity for compliance and security monitoring purposes.

Deployment management

IT maintains control through a structured deployment pipeline with dedicated environments for development, testing, and production use. The platform offers one-click deployment between environments and provides full version control with rollback capabilities, eliminating the need for complex manual processes.

Enabling citizen development safely

Mendix's visual development tools enable business analysts to build applications within guardrails established by IT, utilizing pre-approved components, standardized templates, and secure integrations. Automated quality and security checks prevent common mistakes throughout the development process. 

Why CLEVR? Your Partner in IFS + Mendix Excellence

At CLEVR, we bring specialized expertise in connecting Mendix with ERP systems, such as IFS. With nearly 300 professionals across 18 countries serving over 500 clients, we understand both the technical details and business considerations in these integrations.

What really sets us apart is the fact that we work closely with business and IT teams to identify opportunities for enhancing their IFS environment. Our experts design Mendix applications that connect securely with your IFS ERP while meeting your specific business requirements. Using agile methodologies, we build, test, and refine applications with regular feedback to ensure they deliver exactly what you need.

Extend, don't rebuild

The best enterprise systems today use a single platform that combines specialized tools working together, rather than one system that does everything poorly. The IFS and Mendix combination gives you:

• Speed: Build customer portals, mobile apps, and workflows in weeks instead of months.

• Right Fit: Create exactly what your business needs without compromising.

• Safety: Protect your core ERP investment and upgrade path.

• Flexibility: Adapt quickly as your business evolves without expensive rework. 

Creating a "best of both worlds" scenario, your trusted IFS system handles core business transactions while Mendix provides the agility to address changing market needs quickly. You can build an interactive user experience that puts the right information at your staff's fingertips. And governance topics like security, compliance, and system management remain straightforward with clear processes and responsibilities.

Mendix and IFS can work together for your company. Contact CLEVR for a personalized demo of our integration capabilities.

Research Methodology

This article combines insights from customer case studies with technical information from IFS and Mendix platform documentation. All implementation details reflect actual capabilities verified through practical application in enterprise environments.

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