Portsmouth Aviation Achieves Smoothest IFS Upgrade Implementation in 20 Years

Portsmouth Aviation has run its entire operation, including manufacturing, finance, HR, and document management on IFS for 20+ years. So, migrating from IFS Apps 10 to IFS Cloud ahead of the Apps 10 end-of-life was non-negotiable.

Shortly after starting at Portsmouth Aviation, David Newman, IFS Analyst at Portsmouth Aviation, took this on as one of his first projects at the company. "We knew we had to go to cloud, so it made sense to push it forward. I was very keen to go to the cloud. I think it was the right direction considering that we’re so dependent on IFS,” he says. But the business didn’t have a central resource for recorded system processes. Knowledge was scattered across files, leaving the IFS team with no way to ensure the right process documentation would be created. “We didn't have any clear documentation that was visible to me. I think a lot of the teams had their own documents and guides that they'd done in Word,” David explains.

With only two people in the IFS team, supporting 150 users across 14 departments, they needed a simple way to migrate to IFS Cloud. Crucial to the process was making sure users could adopt the new system with ease, without overwhelming the support desk or stalling the business. Realizing the need for clear, centralized process recordings to support their migration from IFS Apps 10 to IFS Cloud 25 R1, David and his team looked to ClickLearn.

Rather than deploying IFS Cloud on undocumented ground, Newman's team stepped back and first used ClickLearn to document their Apps 10 processes. In this early stage, the IFS team followed two key principles:

1. Defining end goals: What they wanted to achieve and how to make it happen.
2. Mapping processes: Create the processes from the start, work them through, and record them.

The Apps 10 process documentation gave the Cloud project a clear, tested blueprint to move forward. The discipline scaled seamlessly, with 16 workstream leads using ClickLearn to create more than 250 guides for IFS Cloud ahead of the migration. This allowed them to cut go-live time from a projected week down to under two days.`

The ClickLearn-hosted training was delivered entirely in-house, in small, self-scheduled sessions capped at eight people. All 150 users were able to learn the system on their own processes, in their own guides, all before go-live. The Friday before, all employees received an email about the system switch, detailing how to access IFS Cloud and how to get to the process recordings in ClickLearn.

By the time launch arrived, nothing about the system was new to the people using it: "It wasn't a new system for our users by go-live. They'd seen it, they'd used it, they'd trialed it,” says David.

The outcome was, in the words of Portsmouth Aviation's own Managing Director, the smoothest IFS rollout he'd seen in 20 years running the platform. “The fact he said it twice to me is proof that he saw people working smoothly and just getting on with their jobs straight away," David explains.

The go-live day looked like business as usual: Ticket volume remained at a normal ~20 per week across all users, spiking exceptionally high for a go-live. Employees could easily find their own answers in ClickLearn rather than turning to the support team. That self-sufficiency freed the IFS team to focus on the platform instead of user issues.

In David’s words: “Because we used ClickLearn early on, we realized the time-savings it was going to give us in getting processes documented. If we hadn't had ClickLearn, we would have spent a lot of time creating processes; people would have been getting frustrated trying to create a document. With ClickLearn, you can just work through the platform, you look for the green box, you create it, you tick, tick, tick, and it's done. The volume of documentation we had done so quickly indicates how easy it really was.” 

With clear process recordings and intuitive training, David’s team has experienced an increase in IFS adoption: