Process before software: the half of ERP projects that need no code
By CTC Smart Tech · 20 August 2026 · 5 min read
Roughly half of what a business asks an ERP to fix is a handover problem, not a software problem.
When a company calls us about an ERP, the request is usually phrased as software: “we need a system for orders, inventory and accounting.” When we map the process as it actually runs, about half the pain is in handovers between people — sales to operations, operations to accounting — where nobody agreed who owns what.
Fixing those handovers costs a workshop and a one-page RACI, not a licence. Doing it first also makes the software cheaper, because the system then encodes an agreed process instead of a contested one.
Our rule: every process is signed off by its owner and run for one live week before it is called done. Then we specify the software from that process. Our own developers build from the same document, so nothing is lost in translation.
The businesses that skip this step buy a system that mirrors their confusion. It works exactly as badly as before, only faster.
