The Ugliest Process Is Usually Keeping You Alive
The ugliest process in a company is usually the one keeping it alive. Before you delete it, do you know what risk it was built to absorb?
I have watched new execs and consultants walk into a mid-market operator and call the workflow “broken” on day three.
Three approvals for a simple refund. Orders re-keyed into SAP and Salesforce. A forest of Microsoft Excel trackers. Everyone agrees it is painful, so the instinct is to rip it out and “clean it up” with ServiceNow.
The problem is: most of that pain is compensating for something else.
Bad master data. Unreliable integrations. One customer who exploits edge cases. A credit policy that only works because that one manager still double-checks it.
When you remove the ceremony before you remove the constraint, the business pays. Chargebacks rise, cash gets stuck, customer promises get missed, and suddenly the “old way” looks smart.
The faster move is process archaeology: follow the exceptions, find who gets called when it breaks, and identify which steps are habit versus insurance.
In one case, the most hated approval was quietly preventing six figures of monthly credit exposure. We kept it, fixed the root cause elsewhere, and cut cycle time by about 30% without new fires.