Author: David Kidd, Delivery Director, Cooper Software
Paper pick sheets mean your IFS stock is only ever as accurate as this morning. Here's how ACQUIRE closes that gap with real-time, IFS-native scanning.Your IFS stock is only as accurate as your last pile of paper
Here's a scenario that will sound familiar to most warehouse-adjacent IFS users. Stock is accurate in IFS at the start of the day. Then the day happens. Pallets get picked, orders get packed, stock moves around a warehouse the size of a small aircraft hangar, and all that gets tracked the old-fashioned way: on a pick sheet, tallied by hand, with a note if something's damaged or short. Those sheets pile up somewhere and, at some point, someone sits down and keys the lot into IFS.
Which means for most of the day, your IFS system isn't wrong exactly. It's just out of date. And the discrepancies you were always going to find, a short pick, a damaged item, a mismatched batch, don't surface when they happen. They surface at keying time, hours later, when there's very little you can do about them except log the problem and move on.
ACQUIRE exists to close that gap.
What ACQUIRE does, in plain terms
ACQUIRE is Cooper Software's mobile data capture and barcoding system for IFS. In practice, it puts a handheld scanner in the hands of the person doing the picking, and every scan updates IFS now it happens, not at the end of the shift.
Someone scans an item into an order, and that stock has already moved in IFS before they've picked the next item. When the order's ready to ship, moving it to the next stage in IFS and generating a shipping label happens in the same flow, on the same device. If there's a discrepancy, a location doesn't match, a batch looks wrong, it surfaces there and then, while the person who can fix it is standing in front of the stock, not three days later when someone's trying to reconcile a spreadsheet.
The misconception worth clearing up first
The most common assumption people make about a system like this is that it must be a bolt-on: a separate app, with its own database, sitting alongside IFS and synchronising back periodically. That's how a lot of ERP-agnostic warehouse tools work, and it's a reasonable assumption to bring into the conversation.
It's not how ACQUIRE works, and the distinction matters more than it might sound. A bolt-on with its own database means you're maintaining two systems of record: what your warehouse tool says, and what IFS says, with reconciliation and synchronisation in between, and the drift that inevitably creeps in when two systems are both trying to be right at once.
ACQUIRE doesn't hold anything in the middle. It works directly against IFS's own architecture, using IFS's Service-Oriented Component Architecture (SOCA) and web services, so a scan either lands correctly in IFS the moment it happens or it doesn't. There's no secondary source of truth to drift out of sync, because there's no secondary source of truth at all.
The errors this prevents
Manual data entry has a few very specific, very common failure modes in a warehouse, and it's worth naming them because they're the ones that quietly cost businesses the most.
The first is simple transposition. Stock arrives at goodwill, five pallets against a purchase order, someone counts it, writes it on paper, hands it to someone else, who keys it into IFS. Every one of those handoffs is a chance for a number to get written down wrong.
The second is more subtle: lot, batch and expiry mix-ups. Picture a business that makes a product with a two-year shelf life. Everything made in August gets an August-plus-two-years expiry date. Everything made in September gets a September-plus-two-years date. First-made, first-sold is the rule, but on paper it's very easy to pick the wrong batch, because nothing forces you to check. With a scan-based process, you can't progress an order without confirming the batch you're holding, which makes it far harder to pick the wrong one without noticing.
Serial tracking has the same shape of problem, one level more granular. If every unit you make carries a unique serial number, and a specific customer needs to be tied to a specific serial for warranty or traceability reasons, paper makes it easy to write down the wrong one. A scan ties the physical item you're holding to the order it's going on, directly.
None of these are dramatic failures on their own. They're the kind of small, recurring errors that are individually easy to shrug off and collectively expensive.
Why a native app, and why rugged Android and Windows Mobile devices
It's a fair question: why not just build this as something that runs in a browser? The honest answer is that browsers aren't built for what a warehouse floor throws at a device. Scanning needs to be instant and reliable, not dependent on a page finishing a round trip to a server. Warehouses have patchy connectivity by nature: big spaces, metal racking, cold stores and freezers where people are wearing gloves and a browser session can time out mid-task and lose your place.
ACQUIRE runs as a native app on rugged Android and Windows Mobile devices for exactly that reason. The logic needed for a full pick is downloaded to the device up front, so a scanner can survive fifteen minutes of patchy or no connectivity in a freezer and keep working. The point where it needs a live connection again is the handoff back to IFS, not every single scan along the way.
Security that doesn't need reinventing
Because ACQUIRE works directly alongside IFS rather than through a separate system, it inherits IFS's own permissions rather than needing its own. Bring a contractor on for a busy period, and the moment they're set up in IFS, they can log into a handheld device and see exactly what they're authorised to see, nothing more. Offboard them, and their access to the device disappears the moment it disappears from IFS. There's no separate permission set to remember to update, because there isn't a separate permission set at all.
Not just warehousing. What this looks like by industry
The shape of the problem changes a bit depending on what you make and move.
In food and beverage, it's about shelf life, first-expired-first-out picking, and the kind of batch traceability that regulation expects you to have on hand. Distillers and bonded warehouse operators have an extra layer again: every movement of stock is a duty event, so capturing that movement accurately matters for excise as well as for stock accuracy. Cooper Software's work with whisky specialist Gordon & MacPhail is a good example of an IFS environment where that kind of traceability sits right alongside integration and warehouse automation, not as separate concerns.
In manufacturing, particularly where products carry serial numbers and component-level revisions matter, the question isn't just where stock is, it's which unit was built from which components, at which revision. That's the kind of traceability engineering and precision manufacturers need to be able to answer with confidence, not just estimate.
And in engineering, construction and shipbuilding, the unit of interest often isn't a consumable at all, it's an asset: being able to scan a serial object and immediately see its inspection status, or who's qualified to work on it, turns a paper-based asset register into something people can actually trust in the moment.
Proof in practice: Farrow & Ball
The clearest example of ACQUIRE solving a real, specific shipping problem is Cooper Software's work with heritage paint and wallpaper maker Farrow & Ball, where ACQUIRE made a measurable difference to shipping processes both domestically and internationally. It's also a good example of how ACQUIRE fits into the wider supply chain rather than stopping at the warehouse door: standard supply chain steps like generating an Advanced Shipping Notice (ASN) as a pallet leaves the building, so a carrier knows exactly what's on the manifest before it arrives, are part of the same scan-based flow.
Watch it in action
If you'd rather see ACQUIRE than read about it, Cooper Software's webinar, ACQUIRE: Transaction Automation and Process-Driven Mobile Data Collection, walks through exactly this kind of scan-based process from start to finish. You can also get in touch with Cooper Software to talk through what this would look like on your own warehouse floor.
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