There is no single “price” in IFS Cloud — there are several, and a supplier increase can land on any of them. Each one feeds the next purchase order without a mandatory checkpoint on the amount:

• Purchase part cost — the standard or estimated cost on the part record; edited during a routine cost update, it silently repriced everything that reads it.
• Supplier-for-part price — the supplier-specific price and price breaks; a buyer accepts a new list from the vendor and keys it in, delta unchecked.
• Blanket / agreement prices — a renewed blanket purchase agreement carries new pricing that then defaults onto every release against it.
• PO line entry — the default price populates the line, the buyer confirms, and nobody compares it with what was paid last time.

The common thread: IFS Cloud accepts a 12 % increase the same way it accepts a 0.5 % one. Standard IFS does not, out of the box, stop and ask “is this jump intentional?” That is where automation earns its keep. If you have already tackled unconfirmed purchase orders, this is the same class of gap — a control that depends on a human remembering.

Individually, a few percent looks harmless. Multiplied across order lines, quantities and a full year, it is one of the quietest ways a business loses gross margin. A supplier who nudges prices up 3–5 % at renewal, on a part you buy in volume, moves real money — and because the increase is spread over many small transactions, it never triggers the scrutiny a single large invoice would.

The danger is not the one big increase you notice. It is the steady creep you do not — because no single line ever looks wrong enough to question.

Price creep also corrupts everything downstream: cost variances, planned purchase values and next year’s budget baseline all inherit the higher number as if it were normal. Catching the change at the source is far cheaper than unwinding it later.

The good news: IFS Cloud already holds the data you need. The supplier-for-part and agreement records carry the current price; the change itself is an update to a known value. Detection is simply comparing the new price against the previous one and testing the delta against a rule you define. In practice you decide three things:

You can approximate this with a report or Quick Report that lists recent price changes — useful, but reactive: it tells you after the fact, on whatever cadence someone runs it. To catch the change before it posts to new POs, you need an event that fires the moment the price record changes.

A Custom Event is standard IFS Cloud functionality: it watches a table for an insert or update, checks a condition, and fires an action — all inside the Extensibility Framework, with no core modification. That makes it the right tool for price creep, because it reacts at the source the instant a supplier price is changed.

1. The event listens for an update to the supplier-for-part (or agreement) price.
2. It reads the old value and the new value and computes the delta.
3. If the delta breaches your threshold, it fires — otherwise it stays silent.
4. The action alerts the buyer and planner, and where policy requires, routes the change for approval or flags the record so the higher price does not quietly default onto new PO lines.

Because the event triggers on the price change itself, the alert lands before the increase reaches the next purchase order — while it can still be questioned, not after it has posted to a dozen lines.

This is one of the twelve scenarios in the SCM Automation Pack. It is part of a broader pattern — see how to automate SCM processes in IFS Cloud — where the system, not a buyer’s memory, holds the control.

See the SCM Automation Pack Book a 30-minute fit call

An over-eager price alert is as useless as no alert — if it fires on every rounding change, people stop reading it. The rollout matters as much as the logic:

• Start narrow — high-value parts and strategic suppliers, a sensible threshold, then widen.
• Dry-run first — log what would have fired for a test week before anyone gets a single alert.
• Frequency cap — protect against alert storms during bulk price loads.
• Approval tier — alert for small deltas, require sign-off for large ones.
• Tune thresholds — review the false positives after week one and adjust.
• Stay update-safe — standard Custom Events only, so the next upgrade leaves it intact.

Every scenario in the pack ships with dry-run mode and a frequency cap by default, and a mandatory test week before go-live — so the control earns trust before it earns the right to hold a purchase order.

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. Based in Kraków, delivering remotely across Europe and globally as an independent practice — you talk to the consultant who builds it.

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.