Fix, Patch, Repeat: The Hidden Cost of ERP Workarounds
The go-live of your ERP system was supposed to unlock efficiency and streamline operations. Instead, you notice your team drowning in spreadsheets, siloed processes, and misaligned data. Project managers and frustrated teams are stuck in the cycle of ERP workarounds, trying to compensate for a system that doesn’t fit the business it was meant to transform.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects don’t fail overnight and you are not alone. We’ve worked with various organizations, and the pattern remains the same: your ERP has gone live, but the value is lacking. Here’s the hard truth: patching symptoms isn’t progress. It’s a sign that your ERP system is failing in plain sight. What follows is a culture of workarounds, band-aids, and firefighting.
The ERP Workaround Trap and What It’s Costing You
Project managers, by nature, are problem-solvers. But in a misaligned ERP environment, people do what they’ve always done—they find a way to make it work. Over time, patching became the norm. Workarounds become institutionalized, and your teams stop asking “why doesn’t the system work?” and ask, “who can fix the latest issue?”
What started as a temporary adjustment becomes a permanent liability. Your business is going into survival mode.
According to Gartner, over 70% of ERP projects will fail to meet their intended goals, largely due to poor implementation and lack of strategic alignment. ERP project failure doesn’t start with a crash. It starts with compromises. The true cost of ERP workarounds doesn’t show up on a single line item; it affects every process.
Here are the costs that quietly stack up behind the scenes:
Compounding Inefficiency and Productivity Loss
Workarounds are labor-intensive and error prone. Your teams spend hours duplicating efforts, reconciling mismatched data, or manually executing tasks that should have been automated. Approval is delayed as they move through emails instead of workflows. Until leadership realizes that their multi-million-dollar ERP investment is generating little return, it becomes “just the way things are”.
Leadership Mistrust
The C-suite expects outcomes, but when outcomes don’t match investments, executives lose faith in the system. And in the absence of clear communication and a recovery roadmap, the ERP landscape becomes a scapegoat for rising ERP system inefficiencies.
Poor Decision-Making
When data is manipulated outside the system, your ERP implementation issues multiply, and the single source of truth becomes fractured. Leadership loses the ability to make accurate decisions, resulting in missteps and missed opportunities. Cross-functional collaboration deteriorates, and strategic direction wavers.
Long-Term Financial Waste
With 'Lift and Shift’ strategies at play, legacy processes are transferred into new systems without proper realignment, increasing the risks of ERP implementation issues. Over time, the organization’s ability to enforce controls or streamline practices disappears. This drives employee disengagement, eventual workarounds of the workarounds, and ultimately, ERP project failure.
Team Burnout and Disengagement
Inaction is the most dangerous cost of all; pouring more time and resources into a failed ERP system without addressing the root causes silently drains your business’s true potential. Your platform for growth becomes your primary bottleneck. Most project managers and the teams we meet in these scenarios are exhausted. Since go-live, they’ve been in a constant battle of patching holes while balancing expectations. The teams start building parallel processes to get their jobs done and keep the leadership happy. When the entire team’s energy is spent holding the ERP system together, there’s nothing left to move forward.
The right question to ask at this point is: Is this even fixable the way we’re approaching it?
From Patchwork to Framework: Introducing SPEAR
What no one wants to admit is that your ERP rescue strategy will not be successful unless your executives are actively involved and on the same page. Project teams will continue to solve problems they didn’t cause, without the authority to resolve them.
At DCG, we’re not scared of messy, complex rescues—we specialize in them. The SPEAR Framework puts you in the driving seat while emphasizing strategic realignment, process optimization, top-down involvement, adoption readiness, and insights-driven execution.
SPEAR isn’t another checklist or project management toolkit. It’s a strategic, business-first ERP rescue methodology that:
- Gets leadership re-engaged, informed, and accountable.
- Audits where you stand vs what the system was designed to do.
- Aligns the misaligned ERP system with the realities of your business operations.
- Rebuilds your team’s confidence through better accountability, reporting, improved usability, and clear communications.
- Drives quantifiable outcomes as we’re not here to make it feel better. We’re here to make it work.
SPEAR has rescued ERP programs from full-blown crises and those on the brink of losing stakeholder support. We show up with structure, clarity, and the experience to turn it around. In a recent engagement, our first phase uncovered that 60% of high-value ERP workflows were happening outside the system. SPEAR helped us reengineer those processes, improve adoption, and restore executive confidence within 90 days.
What makes SPEAR effective is its flexibility. We can even start with a diagnostic engagement, before the development work begins. You get a clear picture of your ERP environment: what’s working, what’s broken, and where to focus. From there, you decide how far and how fast to go.
Talk to one of our experts and get out of the workaround cycle.
From ERP Workarounds to Wins
If you’re reading this, you already know something is wrong. The good news? It’s fixable. An ERP system doesn’t have to be replaced to be rescued. It must be reimagined.
