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IFS study says manufacturers struggle with green supply chains, rapid and disruptive change

• Market pressure to measure and report on their environmental footprint and their vendors
• Rapid change forces them to regularly change their business models.

More than 80 percent of respondents said that green supply chains - in which companies make purchasing decisions based on non-financial criteria, including the environmental impact of vendors and their products - will become more important in the next three years. The study was conducted in December of 2010 among more than 200 executives with manufacturing operations with greater than $100 million in revenue.

However, respondents indicated that their IT infrastructure, including enterprise resources planning (ERP) software, was not keeping up with their changing green supply chain needs, with 87 percent reporting that this data was handled at least in part through hard copy.

Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of respondents said their companies are running multiple business models or manufacturing modes, 74 percent had added modes in the last five years, 54 percent had added modes –engineer-to-order, engineer, procure, construct, for instance - at least twice in that time, and 28 percent had added modes three or more times.

"Environmental mandates and the constant addition of new manufacturing modes - including engineer-to-order, engineer, procure, and construct and others - are just symptoms caused by an underlying pattern of rapid and disruptive change in the market," IFS North America President and CEO Cindy Jaudon said. "The need to quickly adapt to change has never been lost on us at IFS. That is why we have sought to lead the market when it comes to enabling enterprise agility, designing our product for rapid implementation and ease of reconfiguration and expansion as needs change. We have also introduced IFS Eco Footprint Manager, which allows our customers to track environmental costs just as easily and flexibly as they can manage financial cost within IFS Applications."

The study is publicly available as of today at http://download.ifsworld.com - Industry Reports & Studies category. For more information, contact IFS North America at 1-888-437-4968.

About IFS

IFS is a public company (OMX STO: IFS) founded in 1983 that develops, supplies, and implements IFS Applications , a component-based extended ERP suite built on SOA technology. IFS focuses on industries where any of four core processes are strategic: service & asset management, manufacturing, supply chain and projects. The company has 2,000 customers and is present in more than 50 countries with 2,700 employees in total.

For more information about IFS, please visit: www.IFSWORLD.com

IFS
Kristy Mills, 262 317 7476
Marketing Communications
kristy.mills@ifsworld.com
Chuck Rathmann, 262 317 7419
Marketing Communications Analyst
chuck.rathmann@ifsworld.com