Project Snapshot
Overview
Engaged to diagnose a failed ERP/CRM implementation after two vendors could not deliver — auditing workflows, realigning requirements, and charting a recovery path before leadership committed further resources.
- Product Research Consultant
- Process Auditor
- Workflow Researcher
- Stakeholder Interviews
- Workflow Mapping
- Document & Contract Review
- Process Audit
- Stakeholder Readout
- Implementation direction recovered
- Requirements realigned
- Further failed investment avoided
What the client wanted
- Centralized customer records
- Unified order processing
- Live inventory visibility
- Integrated invoicing and payment tracking
- Management reporting
What was delivered
- Mostly frontend UI
- Backend logic incomplete or disconnected
- Multiple partial data entry points, no integration
- Disconnected workflows across functions
- No central customer or order record
Research Focus
Objectives and guiding questions for the process audit.
Research Approach
Three phases — from discovery through synthesis — each building on the last.
Methods
- Stakeholder & Staff Interviews
- Document & Contract Review
- Process Audit
- Usability Review
- Workflow Mapping
- Journey Mapping
- Requirements Analysis
- Stakeholder Readout Workshop
Analysis & Findings
Six core workflows mapped — all six disconnected or broken in the delivered system, with no central customer/order record linking them.
Customer
Records
Quotation
Workflow
Order
Processing
Inventory
Management
Invoice &
Payment
Reporting
Dashboard
- Customer data entered in multiple places
- Orders tracked in separate spreadsheets
- Inventory not synced to orders
- Invoices disconnected from order records
- No unified reporting possible
- Single customer record links all activity
- Orders flow from quotation to fulfillment
- Inventory updated on order confirmation
- Invoices auto-linked to order records
- Reporting draws from unified data layer
Key Findings
The delivered system was a UI shell without the backend logic to make any workflow function. A second vendor's salvage attempt failed because the architecture was inadequate — not just incomplete.
The unified customer/order record — the system's entire purpose — was never implemented.
Vendor and client held fundamentally different understandings of what the system needed to do at each workflow stage.
A small team covered multiple functions, so workflows overlapped by necessity — but the system was designed for siloed departments that didn't exist.
ERP failures are requirement failures before they are technical failures.
Vendor and client were operating from different mental models of what "centralization" meant in practice. No amount of salvage engineering could fix a system scoped against the wrong understanding of the work.
Outcomes
Research contributions that turned a failed implementation into a recoverable plan.
Deliverables
All 6 workflows documented with gap annotations.
20+ issues categorized by type and severity.
Actionable, sequenced guidance for recovery.
Findings presented to leadership for decision-making.
Proposed workflow redesign around a single customer/order record.
Phased path forward with vendor selection criteria grounded in real workflow needs.
Impact
Reflection
What this project revealed about systems research and vendor engagements.
Workflow mapping with admin revealed where data actually entered the system and where it got lost — abstract requirements interviews alone would never have surfaced it.
Both vendors built against an assumed departmental structure instead of how the small, multi-role team actually worked.
Workflows must be mapped in operational detail before any ERP/CRM contract — and vendor scopes validated against those maps, not generic feature lists.