Independent IFS Cloud practice · Supply Chain
The Monday morning ritual nobody else can run
Key takeaways
- Every Monday, someone opens IFS and runs through purchase orders checking who confirmed and who stayed silent — forty minutes, three years running.
- The routine looks simple. The judgement inside it — which silence means trouble and which means the contact is on holiday — is not written down anywhere.
- A process that depends on one person showing up at 7:30 is not a process. It is a bet, and bets get called on the worst possible Tuesday.
- The fix is not documenting a script — it is externalising the pattern the person already knows into a rule the system can run.
Monday, 7:30am. Coffee. Open IFS. Run through purchase orders one by one, checking which suppliers confirmed and which stayed silent. It takes forty minutes. It has taken forty minutes every Monday for three years. The person who does it is very good at it — they know the suppliers, they know the patterns, they know which silence means trouble and which means the contact person is on holiday. From the outside this looks like the simplest kind of routine: open a screen, scan a list, close it again. From the inside it is a small act of expertise, performed from memory, that nobody has ever had to explain out loud. That is exactly the problem. Here is the uncomfortable question: what happens to that forty-minute check on the Tuesday that person does not show up? This article covers why that knowledge stays tacit, what it costs when the routine cannot run, and how to turn a private judgement call into something the system can apply consistently.
1.Why does the judgement stay in one person’s head?
Nobody sits down to write a specification for a forty-minute Monday routine. It gets learned the way most tacit skills get learned: by doing it, week after week, until the pattern recognition happens faster than the person doing it could explain it. Ask them why supplier X’s silence is fine and supplier Y’s is not, and the honest answer is usually some version of “I just know” — built from three years of watching who is reliably slow to reply and who has never once missed a confirmation without a reason.
There is also no obvious moment to force it into writing. The routine works. It has worked for three years. Nothing about a working process creates pressure to document it — documentation gets written after something breaks, not before, and by then the person who could have written it is exactly the person who is unavailable.
2.What does an undocumented ritual actually cost?
The cost is not visible on any ordinary Monday. It shows up the one Monday the routine cannot run as normal, in four specific ways:
- A stand-in starts from zero. Whoever covers has the same screen and none of the three years of pattern recognition — every silent order looks equally suspicious, or equally fine.
- False positives and false negatives. A cover chases a supplier who was never a risk, and misses one that quietly always is — both waste time, one of them costs money.
- The check simply does not happen. Under pressure, an unfamiliar forty-minute task is the first thing a stand-in defers — and a deferred check is functionally a skipped one.
- Nobody notices it slipped. Because the routine has no record beyond “did it run,” a skipped Monday leaves no trace until an order that should have been chased turns up late.
A process that depends on one person showing up at 7:30 is not a process. It is a bet — and bets have a way of being called on the worst possible Tuesday.
3.How do you see the tacit knowledge in IFS Cloud?
The good news is that most of what looks like intuition is actually pattern recognition against data that already exists in IFS Cloud — supplier confirmation history, typical response lag per supplier, which categories routinely run late without consequence. The person doing the Monday check is, in effect, running an informal statistical model in their head every week.
Making that visible starts with one conversation, not one system change: sit with the person who does the check and ask them to narrate a real Monday out loud — which order they skipped past, which one made them pause, and why. Most of that “why” maps cleanly onto data IFS Cloud already holds: supplier, category, historical confirmation lag, order value. The parts that do not map onto data are usually the genuinely judgement-heavy exceptions worth keeping human — and now you know exactly which ones those are.
4.The private ritual versus an externalised rule
Externalising the pattern does not mean replacing judgement with a black box. It means moving the part of the check that is genuinely pattern-matching into a rule, and keeping the genuinely judgement-heavy exceptions with a person.
| Private ritual | Externalised rule | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the knowledge lives | One person’s memory | A documented rule, run by the system |
| Runs when that person is out | Not reliably | Every Monday, regardless |
| Consistency | Depends on who covers | Same criteria, every time |
| Onboarding a replacement | Months of shadowing | Read the rule, handle the exceptions |
| What’s left for a human | Everything, all the time | Only the genuine judgement calls |
The point is not to remove the person from the process — it is to stop the process from depending entirely on them being present. The exceptions that stay human become more interesting, not less, once the routine pattern-matching is handled elsewhere.
5.How do you roll it out safely?
Do it alongside the person who runs the ritual today, not around them — they are the source of the rule, not an obstacle to it.
- Narrate a real Monday. Capture the actual reasoning behind three or four real decisions, in the person’s own words, before writing any rule.
- Draft the rule and run it in dry-run. Log what it would have flagged over recent weeks and compare it against what the person actually did.
- Review the mismatches together. Every disagreement either sharpens the rule or reveals a genuine judgement call worth keeping manual.
- Pilot for a month with the person still checking. Let the rule run alongside the ritual before either one is trusted alone.
- Hand over coverage, not the whole job. The rule takes the routine load; the person keeps the exceptions and the two-week holiday stops being a risk.
Built inside the IFS Extensibility Framework — standard Custom Events, Workflows and PL/SQL, no core modification — the rule is update-safe from day one, so it avoids the upgrade tax while it quietly covers every Monday.
6.Frequently asked questions
Isn’t this the same as the single-point-of-failure problem?
It is related but distinct. Coverage risk is about who runs the check when someone is absent. This is about what happens even when a stand-in is present — the check runs, but the judgement inside it does not transfer.
Can you really capture years of pattern recognition in a rule?
Most of it, yes — the parts based on supplier history, category and confirmation lag map cleanly onto data IFS Cloud already holds. What is left over is usually a small set of genuine exceptions, which is exactly what should stay with a person.
Will the person who runs the check today feel replaced?
Done well, the opposite. They become the source the rule is built from, and they keep the interesting exceptions instead of the repetitive scanning — and the team stops depending on them never taking a holiday.
Is this update-safe?
Yes. The rule is built with standard Custom Events, Workflows and PL/SQL inside the IFS Extensibility Framework — no core modification, nothing that the next R1/R2 release quietly breaks.
7.About the author
Dariusz Myśliwiec — 25+ years in ERP and supply chain, 17+ on 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.
Get the ritual out of one person’s head
If your Monday check only really works because one person shows up, the fix is smaller than it feels. On a 30-minute call I’ll help you capture what they actually know and turn it into a rule — fixed price, dry-run before anything changes.