 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering IFS World Conference 2018, brought to you by IFS. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World 2018 here at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Peter Schkeltus. I hope I'm saying that correctly. He is the Global Strategy and Sales Director of Enterprise Operational Intelligence here at IFS. Thanks so much for joining us, Peter. Yeah, thank you for having me over here. So let's start this interview by having you tell our viewers a little bit about what you do at IFS. Well, our product actually is a very cool product if you want to improve your business. And I'm talking business, not IT. We use an IT tool for doing that. But India, we are supporting managers to make better and faster decisions. Because in the current environment, current world, change is everywhere and change is coming more rapidly than ever, whenever. And what we do with IFS-EOI, we create a kind of a digital twin of your organization to support all the managers in your organizations to make better and faster decisions connected to each other. It's interesting the digital twin concept because we see it a lot in, like GE uses it a lot. We don't make a digital twin of say a 737 engine because one of those operating say out of Dubai is very different than one of them operating out of Alaska so they can run tests and stuff. But I've never heard anyone say a digital twin of an organization that's really novel approach. So how do you do that? And what are some of the benefits that come out of doing that? Well, yeah, that's a good question. I mean, when you talk about a digital twin, there is a reason for having that. And you think about complex assets and what you would like to do is not only look at the assets, but would like to do predictive and even prescriptive. And the question mark, if you look into organizations, they are complex as well, but they're not that visible and they are not tangible. It's about people, it's about organization, it's organization charge, it's about processes, it's about systems, it's about risk, it's compliance, finance, whatever. Everything projects, programs, so I can continue with that. But the question mark there, if you, and that all those elements are connected to each other, but how can you, as a manager, but you have to manage that all, how can you make a good decision then? If you don't know how it looks like. And what we do is actually visualize this complexity and bring that to the end user. And the end user in this case is a business owner or actually a business guy working in an organization. So he's capable of making those better decisions. And that's the enterprise operational intelligence or the EOI. Yeah, that's how we call it. That's what we call it. And then when you're looking at this complex organization or the digital twin model, can't you kind of switch what you're optimizing for? Because that's always the big question too. What are you optimizing for? Because then you might turn your levers very differently depending on profitability, speed, there's a short-term opportunity. There's a lot of complexity in what are you actually optimizing for? Yeah, for sure. I mean, there are so many elements connected to each other, so it is complex. And what you do see is that you have the classic BI tools and the classic data discovery tools and what they do is they create pictures out of the data because there are so many sources where so many data. But we do it a different way. We do it a different way for a reason because it's not about our target to make the data better. It's about making your business model better. Make your company better. And then we start actually modeling your organization and plotting actually the data, not only financial but also strategic and operational data and even also risk and compliance data to that business model. And then we have, that's well interesting, we have the platform with having included three different engines, which is actually a model engine to create the model of the company. We have a data engine to work with all the data coming from all the different sources. And we have an execution engine, but it's all embedded in one platform. And it is integrated by design. And with, sorry, but one more thing to add, which is really cool is in the end, it's not only backwards looking, but due to the fact that we have the execution engine, you can even put business rules on top and algorithms to go to predictive and even to prescriptive positioning. I'm reacting because you keep talking about the visualizations and I'm always struck by the beautiful visualizations that come out of a lot of these tools. And they're pretty pictures. They're kind of complicated. But so often you look at them and you're like, so what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do now based on this beautifully complex picture? And it's not usually very obvious. So delivering actionable insights is very different than just creating a beautiful visualization of a bunch of data. So what are some of the ways that you help people actually make decisions? Well, there are two elements in. And one element is, of course, I'm talking about a role based on a cockpit. Per role is different, so you get actually what you see. I mean, if you are the CEO or you have the CFO or you're a team leader or whatever, you know what your work is, I assume. So then you give them the picture they want to see. So we have multiple pictures we can show and that's one thing. But in the end it's about people. People have to do something and people have to change. And what we have experienced over the past years is if you give somebody a tool, just a cockpit, and nothing has really changed. So what we are a big supporter of is also to bring in a kind of performance coach. And a performance coach is a different role and sitting next to whatever manager and explaining and working with him together is what is it what we see? What can we do about it? How can we improve? Where can we lower costs? Where can we improve value? Where can we find it? So kind of a performance coach is really important in the implementation approach. Do you see that there will always be a need for a performance coach or does the performance coach help the user then understand, oh, these are the questions I should be asking when I see data that looks like this. I mean, what's the evolution there? Yeah, it's really interesting. It's not always necessary. Of course every organization does have its own majority and if organization is already quite performance centric and know how to work with metrics, the performance coach is not even needed. But you have all kinds of different organizations. So most of the time we just advise to use it as well. But again, that's step by step. Think big, make small steps. So it's agile approach as well. I'm sure the performance coach will eventually get baked into the software where it tells you, if you tweet this lever here, it's going to have that impact. If you tweet that lever here, it's going to have this impact. We see some of that in kind of the sports fitness devices where now they're adding a smart software-driven coach beyond just telling you that you ran four miles or whatever. So I would imagine that's got to be something you guys will implement. Because you've got the data. You know what the factors are. You've got the digital twin. So any good examples that you can share of customers who are starting to put this into practice and some of the results that they're getting? Well, we have quite some customers over the world. Actually all kinds of every, well, not every country in the world, but all regions, yeah, definitely. And we have them from power plants, up to financial institutions, up to airlines, and everything in between, from manufacturing, et cetera. What we do see is that when you start with the EOI concept, we bring in, we start most of the time with the board because if you want to improve your organization from strategy to operation, that should be really bundled so that the people do the right things. But if we don't get a clear view on strategy, how can you expect that all the operational people can do the right things? So that's how we start. And then, and you work with that and you have those first benefits, which is already after a couple of hours while having the most nice example, if I have the board and I give them all white piece of paper and ask them, can you write down the strategy of the company? And I get five different back. And when we just say like it is important to have strategy connected to operations, how can we start change there? So that's the way we started. And then you already see benefits there. But during the process and with the model-driven capability of the platform, by bringing more and more into the connected cockpits, yeah, the more you see and the more benefit you will have. So we have examples of total productivity of a company in a power plant of increasing 20% productivity. 20%. Yeah, absolutely. And we even have a performance where we have 90% savings, 90% savings, of getting all the reports in place. Yeah, that's really interesting numbers. I can tell you. It's amazing how much inefficiency there is still in so many places that can be rung out with the right kind of application and the right focus. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And there is a reason why there is that possibility because when organizations grow, I mean, they will be impacted on different departments. Yeah, different departments. So then you're lacking an end-to-end view with everybody is looking in his own silo, which is a common nature of growth. But while having the connected cockpits and connecting the dots there, you find really money. That's what we're looking for. I know that one of the big objectives is for customers to be able to see results right away, to see benefits right away. And that was also a point that was made in the keynote by CEO Darren Roos, is this real time to value the customers are looking for. Do customers have almost unrealistic expectations though? Because of this 24-7 world that we live in, that they are going to see something right away, this return on investment. And is that ever a challenge that you're trying to meet? Well, not really. You can expect it. But up so far, and we are quite busy for several years right now, it was always the other way around. So the customers are like, wow, was it possible? So they didn't expect us. And that's what I like, then see you coming and then bang, the result is there. But as I said earlier, I think big but make small steps. And in the whole implementation approach and the model-driven nature of the product gives us the opportunity to do work in sprints. Because I don't believe in waterfall approaches or blueprinting organizations because what happens today or tomorrow we don't know. And well, how can I handle if I have to do blueprinting up months? You don't know what's happening. So that's why we have a very agile approach in the sprint methodology in the implementation. And yeah, every sprint is actually a business case on itself. Yeah, that's one example we have now with a service customer in the UK. We even have a cost saving of 27 million pounds over a couple of years. And it's not my maths, but they were their own figures. So yeah, they figured out like that. So that's good. Yeah, it's just the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. It's such a simple concept, but a lot of people are still baked into this. I need to define it, right? I need an MRD and a PRD and we're going to put this big implementation and that's just not it. Just do, right? Just move a little further because you're never there anyway, right? There's no there. Exactly, exactly. It's a transformation path, but it's a daily transformation. Right, right. I'm wondering if there are, if you've observed any ancillary benefits of this digital twin concept in the sense of encouraging more experimentation in companies. And as Jeff was talking about, if I move this lever this way and this this way, if I make this tweak, tinker here or there. Are you seeing that in the sense of companies and individual employees just being more willing to try things? Yeah, but it's very depending on the type of organization. I have to be honest. Okay. So, but yes, I do see, of course, people are used to get their information. You know, the early newspapers, less and less new papers on paper are there. So, which is helping to use cockpits on a digital way. But the thing is, and that's very interesting, if we all walk the same way and that's the funny thing if you do it on the approach like the UI approach from a strategy to operation approach instead of making data, of pictures out of data, then you direct everybody in the same way. And you know, in every organization, you have people, they walk like this and you have people, they do like this. And that is a combination. But the interesting thing is, if you all walk the same direction, then the benefit is bang, it's massive. And that's really interesting because if you have people, they walk the other way around. So that's actually the digital twin and I think EOI, in this case, if you talk about digital transformation, for digital transformation, you need a digital twin, you need IFS-EOI. I think I need a digital twin. It's just a great concept. Again, we hear it all the time in industrial devices as a really interesting way to model and test and like you said, be predictive and prescriptive. But I've never heard it really applied to the application of an organization which is at least as complex as a jet engine. It is, it is. But people, you know, it's the blue worker and the white worker, the color in this case. And now, yeah, this is the next step. Yeah, for sure. All right. And it sounds logic, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Especially when you start testing and tweaking things, absolutely. In the end, you have reality. Reality is changing. Now, and then you have the digital twin. And of course, so the digital twin should be changing, of course. If the real world is changing and this digital twin should be changed and we're connected. But if we want to make scenarios and predictive elements in the digital twin, then the real organization has to change. And that's absolutely the next step and we're just good in it. Great. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Peter. It's been a really great conversation. Thank you. Welcome. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World in a little bit.