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Arcwide wants to offer consulting expertise and cross-industry cloud services from a single source. Philippe Chariot, CEO of Arcwide, and Dr. Philipp Fahr, Leader Germany, Austria & Switzerland at Arcwide, explain the corporate concept in a guest article.
Arcwide has entered the cloud market as a new player. In our new company, a joint venture between BearingPoint and IFS, we combine the professional business services of the consulting firm with cloud technology from IFS. Arcwide has been active in nine European countries right from the start: Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Great Britain. Our services span the full range of IFS Cloud solutions. The starting team has 110 employees, and by the end of the year, there should be 260.
The goal and vision are clear: we want to offer companies a comprehensive package of services that will provide optimal support on their way to the cloud. The experience from many customer projects and the know-how of IFS in terms of industry, technology, and service innovation should give us a decisive advantage in the market. The complete package offers extensive services from a single source throughout the entire cooperation, from consulting, license acquisition, and installation of the IFS Cloud to identifying and developing potential for added value.
Active support of business transformation
With a complete offering, Arcwide also handles complex business challenges for those who need to be measured against the company’s value creation and growth goals. Services include value assessment and scoping and delivery of managed services and other services critical to business transformation, such as training and change management, among others.
Our managed services can be delivered on-site (onshore) and remotely (nearshore and offshore). This can involve development projects relating to the IFS cloud, application management, hosting, administration, and migration to IFS. From the experience of many projects of this type, we know that an IFS implementation is much more than just an IT project: it is about changing business processes and connecting them to a strong business case. For this reason, we offer special “Business Transformation” services. They address both change management, design, and reengineering.
We know that change management is an essential factor for project success. That is why we attach great importance to supporting our employees. A software-side element is a ‘control tower’ that allows the customer, assisted if necessary by our consultants, to measure the solution’s integration throughout the program. We then build a network of ambassadors and a network of mutual support between users. We organize and increase the “enthusiasm” for change on the way through several change management dimensions.
Target-oriented reengineering must consider all options. We, therefore, question both the business requirements and the IFS solution. In doing so, we differentiate between the desired scope of business. Parameters are different axes such as processes, organization, methodology, and tools that we evaluate according to what can be standardized or streamlined. Our experience confirms our approach.
BearingPoint is an independent, global management and technology consultancy with European roots. IFS develops and delivers cloud solutions worldwide for companies that produce and sell goods, build and maintain plants and provide services. IFS combines all industry-specific solutions on a single platform and connects them through a common data model.
Both companies are friendly and connected through a long-standing partnership. BearingPoint, IFS Platinum Partner, recently won the 2021 IFS Growth Partner of the Year Award and the 2020 IFS Global Systems Integrator of the Year Award. The partners have a broad customer base with similar focuses and have successfully implemented numerous projects together over the past five years. Therefore, expanding the partnership is a logical step for both companies.
Ultimately, this constellation offers advantages for customers as well as for Arcwide: The users will benefit from the specific industry know-how of the employees who are moving from IFS and BearingPoint to the new company, the users in the coming months and years from experience, the capacities and reputation of the two founding companies. The focus is on the increased added value through the IFS Cloud – in service management, field service management, enterprise resource planning, and enterprise asset management – and an accelerated time-to-value.
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