The Question Your IFS System Should Already Be Able to Answer.

Author: David Kidd, Delivery Director, Cooper Software

There is a person in almost every IFS-using business who everyone knows to go to. They have been there long enough to understand not just how the system works, but how your system works. How the approval workflow was set up after the finance director changed the sign-off limits. Why that supplier is configured the way it is. What happens when you raise a purchase order for a non-stock item.

When that person is on holiday, things slow down. When they leave, things break.

It is not a people problem. It is a knowledge problem. And it is one that most businesses have quietly accepted as the cost of running a complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

We do not accept it. And that is why we built AskCooperSoftware.ai.

What the problem looks like

Support calls in IFS businesses fall into a few distinct categories. Some are genuine technical issues. For example, something is not working, something is stuck, and it needs fixing. Some are strategic. For example, a finance director wants a report that does a specific thing, and the business needs to understand whether that is something IFS can do natively or whether it needs building.

And then there is a third category. The one that nobody talks about much, but which makes up a significant chunk of support volume. Questions like: how do I raise a purchase order? How do I create a work order on the manufacturing floor? How does my approval workflow function? Day-to-day operational questions from people who are trying to do their jobs and need guidance on how to do them inside the system.

These questions are costing businesses real money. At Cooper Software, our managed service customers are paying for support that should not need a consultant to answer. When someone rings the service desk asking how to do something routine in IFS, they are spending budget that would be better directed at genuine improvement work.

It’s urgent because customers are already starting to find workarounds. Generic AI tools are getting surprisingly good at answering IFS questions from public documentation. People are typing their queries into ChatGPT and muddling through. Against the backdrop of this kind of erosion, we think there is a much better middle ground available.

Why generic AI tools do not solve it

The middle ground is not generic AI. It is personalised AI.

If you ask a general-purpose AI assistant how to run a purchase order approval in IFS, it will tell you how IFS works in general. It will not tell you how your IFS solution works. It does not know that your business routes approvals differently above a certain threshold. It does not know about the integration you have into Sage Payroll, or the customisation built into your purchase order flow, or the specific modules your business uses and the ones it does not touch.

In IFS, customisations are often referred to as CRIMs. Add-ons, custom fields, and modifications that reflect how a particular business has shaped the software to fit its own processes. These are invisible to any tool that relies on public documentation. They are also, very often, the exact thing someone needs to understand to do their job properly.

That gap between "how IFS works" and "how our IFS works" is precisely where support tickets get raised, where new starters struggle, and where process errors accumulate.

What AskCooperSoftware.ai does

AskCooperSoftware.ai is grounded in your specific IFS environment. Before it is deployed, it is given your business context: the modules you use, the customisations you have in place, your approval workflows, your integration points, the quirks and specifics that make your IFS setup yours.

When a user asks a question, they are not getting a generic IFS answer. They are getting a response from something that understands their environment, in the same way a Cooper Solution Architect who had spent months on their implementation would.

It does not lecture. It does not dump sources or cite underlying documents. It does not expose the knowledge held in the background. It converses. It is helpful and direct, in the way that a knowledgeable colleague would be, rather than a search engine or a support portal.

We have been using it internally at Cooper Software for over 12 months. In that time, it has changed how our own team handles knowledge transfer and system queries, reduced the volume of routine questions reaching senior consultants, and made onboarding faster for new team members who can now get reliable answers without interrupting colleagues.

Users and administrators can also contribute directly to this knowledge base. Business decisions, process changes, and operational context can be added over time, meaning the assistant grows with the business. If approval thresholds change, if a new integration goes live, if a process is redesigned following a restructure, that context can be captured and reflected in future responses. The corpus is not static. It is something the business owns and shapes.

The two types of users it serves

The product is designed around two quite different use cases, and this distinction matters.

For day-to-day users, it is a way to get things done. A new starter on the finance team, a warehouse operative, someone who needs to create a work order and cannot remember the process. They ask AskCooperSoftware and get an answer that reflects how their business works. No ticket raised. No colleague interrupted. No waiting.

For decision-makers and power users, including IT managers, finance leads, and leadership teams, it functions differently. They use it as a discovery tool. A CFO who wants a particular report and is not sure whether IFS can produce it natively can explore what is possible, understand the options, and then come into a conversation with a Cooper consultant with a proper brief already formed. What used to start with an hour or two of scene-setting can now start at the point of actual problem-solving.

In both cases, the product knows when to hand over. If something looks like a development requirement, or a genuine architectural question, it will say so clearly and direct the user to Cooper Software. It is not trying to replace consultancy. It is trying to make sure that consultancy time is spent on things that need it.

How it is bundled and deployed

AskCooperSoftware.ai is available now to Cooper Software managed service customers. It is included as part of the existing managed service relationship rather than priced as a separate product. The intent is straightforward: if you are a managed service customer, you should have 24/7 access to expertise about your own software. This is how we are delivering that.

Deploying it involves a personalisation process to ground the assistant in your specific IFS setup. It is not lengthy. For customers not currently working with Cooper, it is designed as an accessible entry point into the relationship. It works across IFS Cloud and is also available to customers on earlier releases who are considering or planning a move to Cloud.

Where it goes next

This is the first version of something we intend to build out significantly.

Right now, AskCooperSoftware.ai answers questions about the software - how it works, how your version of it is configured, what is possible. The next chapter is answering questions about the data inside the software.

Imagine a finance director who, instead of navigating to a report inside IFS, simply asks: how many customers churned last year? Which purchase orders were raised in February? What was our biggest outstanding invoice this quarter? And gets a direct, conversational answer based on live system data.

That capability already exists in some other ERP platforms. It does not yet exist meaningfully in the IFS ecosystem. We think we can get there, and we think getting broad adoption of the conversational interface now is the right foundation for building towards it.

AskCooperSoftware.ai is the start of that journey. And given the pace at which this space is moving, we are not hanging around.

Want to find out more or request a demo? Get in touch with our team here to discuss your environment and what personalising AskCooperSoftware.ai for your business would involve.

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