How it shows up
The ERP, the CRM, or the vertical product does the ordinary jobs. The part that makes you different (special pricing, multi-party approval, how the field actually works) lives beside it.
Why it happens
Vendors sell the common case. Your margin often lives in the uncommon case. Teams protect the uncommon case with spreadsheets because the last implementation told them not to customize.
If nothing changes
The missing portion is often where differentiation, special pricing, operational rules, customer experience, approvals, and multi-party coordination actually live.
Money
The rules that protect margin are the ones the standard product will not hold.
Time
Staff maintain a shadow process after every official one.
People
New hires learn the software, then they learn 'how we really do it'.
Process
There are two processes: the one in the manual, and the one that ships the work.
Customers
The experience they notice is the exception path, which is the unsupported one.
Risk
Shadow processes are undocumented, unbacked-up, and person-dependent.
Growth
You cannot clone a spreadsheet culture into a second site cleanly.
Questions worth asking
Which steps of the critical process happen outside the system of record?
Were those steps left out because the product cannot do them, or because the last project ran out of time?
If you turned the spreadsheets off tomorrow, what would stop?
Is the gap an integration, a workflow, or a genuine product hole?
Who is willing to own the real process?
When it is working
Standard software does standard jobs. The company's rules (pricing, approvals, field realities, customer-specific paths) have a place designed for them. Side processes shrink because they are no longer required to make the work possible.
What we might actually do
Keep the standard product
If it already does the job, leave it. Rebuilding it does not make the company look more serious.
Integration
When the missing piece is already in another competent system.
A purpose-built workflow or application
When the differentiator will never be a vendor checkbox.
Buy versus build, in writing
Name what you will not build. That is part of the design.
When software is the wrong first move
- A mature product already handles the requirement and is unused.
- The process is still being invented. Software would freeze a draft.
- The request is to recreate the ERP because it is unpopular.
Where we see it
Roles this hits
Related problems
Selected work
Comparable files are walked through in a working session. We do not invent percentages for the website.
Describe the process as it runs. A specification is optional.