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Independent IFS Cloud practice · Supply Chain
The single point of failure wearing a friendly face: how to make the check survive the person
Key takeaways
- Most supply chains run on one person’s Monday-morning ritual: unconfirmed orders, suppliers who go quiet, dates about to slip. They carry half of it in their head and half in a spreadsheet nobody else can read.
- When that person takes two weeks of leave, the check does not happen. You find out the day the material fails to arrive, not the day the supplier went silent.
- A task that lives in one person’s memory is not a process. It is a single point of failure wearing a friendly face.
- The fix is rarely a bigger team. It is a Custom Event that performs the same check, on the same schedule, whether or not anyone remembers to log in.
Every distributor has one. The buyer who checks unconfirmed purchase orders every Monday morning before the rest of the team is at their desk. The planner who knows, without checking a report, which two suppliers go quiet after they accept an order. The person who can glance at an open-order list and tell you which lines are fine and which ones are quietly not moving. None of that is written down anywhere. It lives in their head, in a personal spreadsheet, in a habit built over years of getting burned. Then they take two weeks of leave, or move teams, or leave the company outright, and the check simply stops happening. Nobody decided to stop it. Nobody was told to cover it. It just was not there, and the first sign is a stalled line, not a missed task. Here is why the check ends up owned by one person, what that exposure actually costs, how to spot it before it bites, and how to make the coverage survive the person who invented it.
1.Why does one person end up carrying the whole check?
It never gets assigned on purpose. Someone gets burned by a supplier who went quiet after accepting an order, so they start checking every Monday. It works, so it becomes their habit, then their reputation, then the thing everyone assumes is handled because “that’s just what they do.” Nobody writes a procedure for it, because there was never a moment that needed one. It grew organically, out of one competent person closing a gap the system itself does not close.
The trouble is that competence looks identical to resilience until the person is not there. A habit is not documentation. A personal spreadsheet is not a system of record. And a check performed from memory has exactly one point of failure: the memory. The same pattern shows up wherever a system leaves a gap between a record changing and someone noticing it: unconfirmed orders, silent suppliers, stock drifting toward a shortage. One person quietly plugs the gap, and the organisation never has to think about it again, until the day that person is unavailable.
2.What does that single point of failure actually cost?
The cost does not show up as a line item labelled “coverage gap.” It shows up two or three weeks later, wearing a different name entirely:
- A delayed discovery window. Instead of catching a silent supplier on day three, you catch it on the delivery date, when there is no slack left to recover.
- A scramble to reconstruct context. Whoever covers the gap does not know which suppliers historically go quiet, so they are relearning judgment the absent person already had.
- Expediting and premium freight. Recovering a week that slipped silently costs real money, and it costs it every single time the coverage gap opens.
- A quiet erosion of trust in the system. Leadership learns the process only works when a specific person is present, which is not a process at all. It is a dependency.
The real cost is not the two weeks of leave. It is that the organisation never finds out how exposed it was until the exact week it could least afford to.
3.How do you see this exposure inside IFS Cloud?
Start by asking a blunt question about any recurring check that matters: if the person who does it were unreachable for two weeks starting tomorrow, would anyone else know it needed doing, know how to do it, and know who to tell? For most supply chain teams, the honest answer is no for at least one check: usually unconfirmed purchase orders, sometimes supplier confirmation lead time, sometimes stock trending toward a shortage.
IFS Cloud already holds the data behind every one of those checks in its projections: order state, order age, confirmation status, stock position. What it does not hold is a record of who is supposed to be looking, or what happens if they are not. That is the gap worth mapping first. Not by asking who is busy, but by asking which checks exist only because one named person remembers to run them, and what the blast radius looks like if that stops for a fortnight.
4.A memory-based check versus a systematic one
The fix is not asking the buyer to write a longer handover note before their next holiday. A handover note is still a person, just a slower one. The fix is moving the check itself, the same logic that already lives in someone’s head, into something that runs on a schedule regardless of who is at their desk. That is exactly what a Custom Event does with the same unconfirmed-order logic covered here, applied more broadly to any check currently owned by one person’s habit.
| Memory-based check | Systematic check | |
|---|---|---|
| Runs when | The one person is present | Every day, on schedule |
| Survives leave | No | Yes |
| Survives turnover | No, leaves with the person | Yes, belongs to the system |
| Coverage | Whatever one person can hold in mind | Every order, every site |
| Handover cost | Weeks of tacit knowledge to transfer | None, the rule already knows |
None of this is a criticism of the person doing the check today. They built something valuable out of nothing, because the system did not do it for them. The point is simply that valuable and durable are different properties, and only one of them survives a two-week absence.
5.How do you roll this out without disrupting anyone?
The person who owns the check today is your best source, not an obstacle. Start by asking them to describe exactly what they look for and why, then encode it.
- Interview the owner. Sit with the person doing the check and write down the exact logic they use: which fields, which thresholds, which suppliers get extra scrutiny.
- Encode it as a Custom Event. Turn that logic into a rule that watches the same data, on the same schedule, without anyone opening a report.
- Run it in dry-run alongside the person. Let the automated version flag what it would have caught, and compare it against what the human caught that week. Close the gaps.
- Go live with the person still checking manually. For one full cycle, run both in parallel so trust in the automation builds before anyone relies on it exclusively.
- Test it during an actual absence. The real proof is the next time that person is on leave: does the check still happen, and does the right person get told?
This is built inside the IFS Extensibility Framework, using standard Custom Events, Workflows and PL/SQL, so it is update-safe. There is no core modification for the next release to break, so the coverage you build today keeps working after every upgrade, not just until the next one.
6.Frequently asked questions
What is a single point of failure in a supply chain team?
It is any recurring check or judgment call that only happens because one specific person remembers to do it, with no documented process or system behind it. If that person is unavailable, the check silently stops, and there is no error message telling anyone it stopped.
Isn’t this just a handover-documentation problem?
Documentation helps, but it is still a person executing a manual step, just a different one. A handover note does not run itself while everyone is in a meeting or the named backup is also out. Moving the logic into a scheduled rule removes the dependency on any specific person being available at all.
Will the person who currently owns the check feel replaced?
In practice, the opposite. Their judgment becomes the rule, they stop losing Monday mornings to a manual scan, and they are the first to get credit when the escalation catches something on the one week they are out. The interview step exists specifically so their expertise is what gets encoded.
How do we find out which checks in our team are single points of failure?
Ask each person on the team what would not get checked if they were out for two weeks starting tomorrow. The honest answers name the exposure directly, and they usually cluster around the same two or three checks: unconfirmed orders and supplier follow-up are the most common.
7.About the author
Dariusz Myśliwiec has 18 years of hands-on IFS practice (Apps 7.5-10 and IFS Cloud). He is an IFS Certified Associate Consultant and PRINCE2® 7 certified. His practice is based in Krakow and works remotely across Europe and beyond. 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.
Make the check survive the person
If your supply chain runs on one person’s Monday-morning habit, the exposure is invisible right up until the week you can least afford it. A 30-minute call is enough to map which checks in your team are single points of failure and what encoding them would take. Fixed price, dry-run before anything goes live.
