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Independent IFS Cloud practice · Supply Chain
The handover that never happened - what leaves with a departing buyer, and how to keep it
Key takeaways
- A formal handover transfers the supplier list and the login. It rarely transfers the unwritten rules a buyer built over years.
- The cost is a four-week gap where a competent replacement still catches exceptions on day seven instead of day one.
- Nobody wrote the rules down because nobody had to, while the person who knew them was still in the building.
- Turning the tacit rules into system rules (via Custom Events) means the knowledge survives the departure that created the gap.
A buyer leaves. There are two weeks of handover: the replacement sits beside her, takes notes, learns the suppliers. On paper, the transition looks thorough. What does not get handed over in those two weeks is the part that made her good at the job: which supplier needs a phone call and not an email, which order number sequence means a rush job, which delivery date is real and which is a placeholder the supplier always beats by three days. None of that lives in IFS. None of it lives in any document. It lives in her head, and it leaves the building with her on the last day. The replacement is competent and learns the formal system within a month. For the four weeks before that, exceptions that would have been caught on day one are caught on day seven, or not at all. This article covers what actually leaves when someone departs, what the gap costs, how to see it forming in IFS Cloud, and how to capture the unwritten rules before the next departure, not after.
1.Why does a formal handover miss the rules that matter?
A handover plan, however thorough, transfers what is easy to name: accounts, passwords, open orders, supplier contacts. It struggles with what the departing buyer cannot easily name herself, because she has never had to. Eight years of pattern recognition compresses into instinct: she does not consciously decide that a particular supplier’s confirmation email means nothing and a phone call means everything. She just knows, and knowing that well is hard to teach in two weeks of shadowing.
The organisation rarely notices the gap while the expert is still there, for the same reason it never got written down: the system works. It is only once she is gone that the absence of documentation becomes visible, and by then the two-week handover window has closed and the person who could have filled in the details is unreachable.
2.What does the missing handover actually cost?
The cost of an incomplete handover does not show up as a single event. It shows up as a slow degradation in how quickly exceptions get caught, spread across the weeks it takes the replacement to rebuild the instinct that used to be automatic:
- Lost judgement calls. The replacement follows the documented process correctly and still misses the exception that only experience would have flagged.
- Wrong channel, wrong urgency. A supplier who needed a call gets an email instead, and a routine order that needed no attention gets chased unnecessarily.
- The four-week gap. Not a training problem but a gap between the old buyer’s intuition and the new buyer’s training, closing slowly, one mistake at a time.
- Repeat incidents. The same exception type the old buyer caught reflexively resurfaces, because the rule that caught it was never written down anywhere but in her head.
Every departure is a knowledge-loss event. The only question is how much of what walked out the door was ever written down in the first place.
3.How do you see the gap in IFS Cloud?
The gap is measurable, even though the knowledge itself was never in the system. Compare how quickly exceptions were caught and resolved in the weeks before a departure against the weeks after: the same exception types, the same order volumes, a different name attached to the resolution. The slowdown in catch time is the size of the handover that did not happen.
Most teams never run this comparison, because by the time the gap is obvious it feels too late to be useful. It is not. The same comparison, done after the fact, tells you exactly which categories of exception depended most heavily on one person’s judgement, and which rules are worth capturing before the next departure, not after.
4.Manual handover versus rules captured in the system
The fix is not a longer handover. It is moving the rules a buyer has never had to write down out of her head and into the system, using the same approach that addresses concentration risk in a single expert before anyone leaves.
| Manual handover | Captured as system rules | |
|---|---|---|
| What transfers | Supplier list and login | Supplier list, login, and the rules behind the calls |
| Where it lives | The departing buyer’s memory, for two weeks | IFS, as a Custom Event or rule |
| Survives departure | No | Yes |
| Ramp time for replacement | About four weeks to rebuild the instinct | Days: the rule already fires |
| Fails when | The handover window closes | Never: the rule does not resign |
None of this replaces a good handover conversation. It means the conversation is backed by rules that keep working after it ends.
5.How do you roll it out safely?
Do this while your best people are still in the building, not after the notice period starts.
- Interview before departure notice, not during it. Ask the exception-handling questions now, with any long-tenured buyer, not only the one who happens to be leaving next month.
- Name the unwritten rules. Which suppliers need a call, which order patterns mean urgency, which dates are real: write down the ten that matter most for each buyer.
- Turn the clear ones into Custom Events. A rule that always applies (call this supplier, flag this pattern) becomes a system alert instead of private knowledge.
- Pilot on one buyer’s rules. Encode one person’s judgement first, confirm the alerts match what she would actually have done, then widen.
- Repeat before every departure. Make the interview a standard step in any planned exit, not a scramble in the final two weeks.
Built with standard Custom Events, Workflows and PL/SQL inside the IFS Extensibility Framework, none of this touches the core, so it stays update-safe and ready long before the next resignation letter arrives.
6.Frequently asked questions
What exactly gets lost when an experienced buyer leaves?
Not the supplier list or the login, because those transfer easily. What is lost is the judgement built from years of pattern recognition: which supplier needs a call instead of an email, which dates are padded, which order types are actually urgent. None of that is written down anywhere.
Can a longer handover period fix this?
It helps a little, but not as much as it seems. Most of what makes an experienced buyer effective is instinct she has never had to articulate, so a longer shadowing period mostly buys more anecdotes, not a complete transfer of judgement.
How do you capture something someone doesn’t know they know?
By asking specific, scenario-based questions rather than open ones: which supplier’s confirmation you actually trust, which order sequence means a rush, which delivery date you privately discount. The specific version of the question usually surfaces the rule the general version misses.
Is this update-safe?
Yes. The rules are built as standard Custom Events, Workflows and PL/SQL inside the IFS Extensibility Framework, with no core modification for the next release to break.
7.About the author
Dariusz Myśliwiec : 18 years hands-on with IFS (Apps 7.5–10 and IFS Cloud). IFS Certified Associate Consultant. PRINCE2® 7. Independent practice based in Kraków, delivered remotely across Europe and globally: you talk to the consultant who builds it, not a sales layer.
Selected clients: Fugro · LGC · BVI Medical · Betafence (PRÆSIDIAD) · Barlinek · NGK Ceramics · Newag · Oleofarm.
IFS is a registered trademark of IFS AB; this practice is not affiliated with IFS AB.
Capture it before she leaves
If a key departure is on the horizon, or you are still recovering from one, a short interview can turn years of instinct into rules that outlast any single resignation. On a 30-minute call I’ll map the approach to your team: fixed price, no obligation.
