What You Don't Know Is Already Costing You

Author: David Kidd, Delivery Director, Cooper Software

When customers come to us talking about IFS housekeeping, the conversation usually starts in the same place. Something surfaced that they did not know about. A licence audit they were not quite ready for. A background job that had been failing silently for weeks. A clutch of users still active in the system six months after they left the business.

None of it is anyone's fault. Complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) environments generate enormous amounts of operational data, and without the right tools to surface it, that data simply does not get seen.

PULSE was built to change that.

From Monitoring Tool to Operational Intelligence

It would be easy to describe PULSE as a monitoring product, and technically that is accurate. But it undersells what the tool actually does in practice.

PULSE sits in the background of your IFS environment and watches everything, infrastructure and application together, building a continuous picture of operational health. When something goes out of tolerance, it does not wait for a user to notice. It acts. An alert is raised, a support ticket is automatically created with our services team, and we are talking to you about the problem before you even knew it existed.

That shift from reactive to proactive is the real value proposition. Rather than treating managed support as something that kicks in when things go wrong, PULSE turns it into continuous, 24/7 operational intelligence. Your system is always being watched. Issues are caught early. Downtime is avoided before it happens.

What PULSE Actually Tracks

The scope of what PULSE monitors across IFS is broad. On the infrastructure side, it covers the usual suspects: CPU, memory, and server performance. But it is the application-level monitoring where PULSE earns its keep for IFS customers specifically.

• Background jobs and print queues.

• Licence management. 

• Report usage analysis. 

• User inactivity alerting. 

The Value During Implementation

One area where PULSE is already proving its worth is during active IFS Cloud implementations and upgrades. When you bring a new environment live, you are making educated guesses about infrastructure sizing. You set CPU and memory allocation based on your best estimate of what the business will actually put through the system, and then you wait to see what happens.

With PULSE, that guesswork becomes data. If background jobs are consistently peaking at 100% CPU overnight, you know about it immediately and can make the necessary adjustments before users are impacted. If a significant portion of your finance team has not logged in during the first fortnight of go-live, you know about that too and can take action.

The ability to track adoption in real time, see which parts of the system are being used and which are not, and correlate that with performance data makes for a very different implementation experience.

AI-Assisted Insight, Used Appropriately

PULSE includes AI-generated summaries that help surface patterns across error logs over time. We want to be straightforward about what this means in practice. PULSE is not an AI product. It is an operational intelligence platform that uses AI in one specific and genuinely useful way - to help identify correlations across clusters of errors that might otherwise require significant manual investigation to understand.

If a series of related errors are appearing across a week and there is a meaningful pattern between them, the AI summary will surface that connection. It is one feature of a broader product, used where it genuinely adds value, rather than something bolted on for marketing purposes.

Customisable, Flexible, and Built Around Your Team

Not every business wants the same response to an alert. The default path with PULSE is that when something goes out of tolerance, it automatically raises a support ticket with Cooper Software's services team, and we are in touch with the customer before they even need to pick up the phone. For customers on managed support, that is a natural extension of what they are already paying for.

For customers who want their internal IT team to receive the alert first and decide whether to escalate, PULSE supports that too. The alerting and routing is configurable. What matters is that the right people are informed at the right time, regardless of which path your organisation prefers.

A Natural Extension of Managed Support

PULSE is currently in use with live IFS Cloud customers, and there are many businesses moving towards implementation over the coming months. The commercial model is straightforward. For customers on Cooper Software managed support, PULSE comes as part of the package. The vision is that every cloud customer on managed support will have PULSE running within the next four to five months.

The reasoning is simple. If you are paying for managed support, you should not have to wait for something to break before you get value from it. PULSE means that support becomes continuous, not episodic. We are monitoring your environment constantly, catching problems early, and acting on your behalf, which is what managed support should look like.

The Question Worth Asking

If you are an IFS Cloud customer, here is a straightforward question worth sitting with. What is happening in your environment right now that you do not know about?

There are background jobs that may be failing silently. There are licensed users who have not logged in for months. There are reports that nobody runs but that still sit in your system and need to be maintained. There are errors appearing in logs that nobody is reading.

PULSE does not promise to make IFS perfect. It promises to make sure you are never the last to know when something needs attention.

If you would like to see PULSE in action, get in touch with our team to arrange a demonstration.

Read more about PULSE here PULSE: Monitoring and actionable reporting 

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