Before You Buy: Mapping the Ghost Processes
- Evan J Schwartz
- Jul 13
- 5 min read
Why you must surface the undocumented workflows haunting your ERP investment—and how AI can help.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know—Yet
Before you sign the first contract. Before the demos. Before the slick vendor slides and ROI calculators—there’s one uncomfortable truth that every business must face:
You probably don’t fully understand how your business actually works.
Not the way it's documented in your SOPs or outlined in process maps built years ago—but how it truly runs, day to day, person to person, across regions, workarounds, legacy tools, Excel hacks, emails, tribal knowledge, and swivel-chair integrations that aren’t reflected anywhere in your current ERP.
These are your ghost processes—and if you don’t map them early, they’ll become the most expensive and disruptive surprise of your implementation.
What Are Ghost Processes?
Ghost processes are workflows and decision points that occur outside of official systems or documented procedures. They arise over time—out of necessity, workaround, exception handling, or because “the system just doesn’t do that.” These workflows often span multiple departments, involve manual data handling, or reflect changes in the business that were never captured formally.
Here are a few examples:
The ops coordinator manually downloads a CSV and uploads it to a supplier portal each week.
A customer service rep adjusts pricing based on a shared Google Sheet because the ERP pricing engine can't handle exceptions.
Warehouse staff know that for one specific region, orders get relabeled in a way that isn't tracked anywhere except an old spreadsheet on a shared drive.
These may seem minor. But they are precisely the kinds of overlooked workflows that can stall your ERP project mid-flight—especially when your vendor discovers them too late, and you’re forced to either rework your process or customize the system (both expensive).
Why It Matters Before You Buy
If you’re serious about digital transformation, you must know what you have before you shop for what’s next.
During the Pre-Sales and Procurement phase, you’ll be asked by vendors and consultants to describe your current processes and pain points. If your response is based only on outdated process docs and what leadership thinks is happening, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Worse, your vendor will assume everything important has already been captured. So if a ghost process surfaces during implementation, you may face scope increases, missed milestones, or even trust erosion between your internal teams and the vendor.
The best way to prevent this? Map your processes completely and accurately—with the help of AI.
Enter AI: The Process Discovery Power Tool
Artificial Intelligence, particularly generative AI and natural language tools, now gives businesses an unprecedented advantage in process mapping and discovery.
You can now feed AI your existing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), policy documents, training guides, RFPs, and even call transcripts—and have it extract process steps, decision points, systems involved, and data touchpoints.
More importantly, it can flag inconsistencies, spot manual steps, and help you convert narrative documents into process maps—without spending weeks in whiteboarding workshops.
Here’s a sample prompt you can run in ChatGPT or a comparable tool to get started:
🧠 Prompt: Process Mapping from SOPs
“You are a business analyst tasked with creating a process map. Below is an SOP describing how our team handles customer returns. Please extract the main steps, responsible parties, decision points, and systems involved. Present the process in clear bullet points and suggest a swim lane diagram layout I could build from this. Highlight any steps that appear manual, high-risk, or poorly documented.”
🧠 Prompt: Surface Ghost Processes from Document Sets
“You are an ERP business consultant. I’m preparing to implement a new ERP and need to identify potential ‘ghost processes’—workarounds, manual steps, or undocumented workflows that could impact our future configuration. Below is a mixture of SOPs, meeting notes, and user training guides. Scan and summarize potential areas of undocumented process or high customization risk.”
AI isn’t a replacement for human insight and intuition—it’s a force multiplier. Your team still needs to validate the AI’s findings, primarily through conversations with boots-on-the-ground employees. But it accelerates what used to take weeks into a matter of hours.
And once the ghost processes are surfaced, you can decide how to handle them: retire them, redesign them, or formally adopt them into your new solution architecture.
Build Your AS-IS Map: Systems, Swivel-Chairs, and All
Once you’ve extracted your actual workflows, build your AS-IS architecture map. This should include:
Every system in play—whether fully integrated or standalone (Hard-lines and Dotted-Lines help here tremendously)
Manual file movements (e.g., downloads from one system, uploads to another)
Roles involved in each step
Data origins and destination points
Known pain points or inefficiencies
Compliance flags or audit dependencies
This map becomes the foundation of your RFP, your vendor conversations, and your Pain Delta analysis—which identifies where the cost of inaction outweighs the investment in change.
Use AI here too. You can prompt:
“Given this list of systems and manual workflows, help me build a component-level AS-IS architecture diagram. Organize by department and function. Highlight weak integrations and data gaps.”
What’s the ROI of Ghost Process Mapping?
Failing to uncover a critical workflow during Pre-Sales can cost your project hundreds of hours and thousands in change requests. Worse, it often undermines stakeholder confidence and can introduce friction between business users and your implementation partner.
In contrast, mapping ghost processes:
Improves vendor fit—you’ll know which solutions handle your reality, not just your ideal.
Reduces surprises during implementation
Enables better pain delta calculations by showing the true cost of the current system
Gives you leverage in negotiations when you show up with documentation, clarity, and priorities
And best of all? It helps you write a compelling Vision Statement, grounded in the real challenges and opportunities of your current state.
Ready to Map Yours?
We’ve built a Phase 1 toolkit to help you do exactly this. It includes:
A Vision and Non-Negotiables Worksheet 👉 [Beating the Odds]
A Pain Delta Calculator
An AI-Enhanced AS-IS Mapping Workbook
Sample Prompts and a how-to guide for using AI to augment your discovery phase
👉 [Access a sample of this complete Phase 1 toolkit here]👉 [Go to the Phase 1 Lessons in The Customer Journey to get the entire course]
Closing Thought: Shine a Light Early
Your ERP journey doesn’t begin with a demo. It begins with understanding. Ghost processes live in the shadows—but your implementation can’t afford surprises.
Use the tools. Use AI. Use the voice of your front-line staff.
Map your business before you buy—and make sure you’re not just rolling out a new system, but building a future that works and can grow with your company.
Let’s make sure your story doesn’t become another line in the Gartner statistics.