Operational Workarounds: The Risk You're Building

Someone on your team keeps a personal spreadsheet to track order statuses because the system doesn’t show them fast enough. Someone else sends a daily email with numbers pulled from three different tools because no single report covers what the boss needs. These aren’t failures — they’re operational workarounds. And every growing business has more of them than anyone realizes.

Why Your Team Builds Workarounds

Workarounds aren’t laziness. They’re your team’s way of solving a problem that the official process doesn’t handle. The reasons are predictable:

The system doesn’t match reality. Your ERP was configured for how the business worked two years ago. New product lines, new customer types, or new approval flows weren’t part of the original setup. The system didn’t change, so your team adapted around it.
Edge cases aren’t covered. Standard processes handle 80% of transactions. The other 20% — rush orders, special pricing, the exceptions your biggest customers expect — require someone to step outside the system and improvise.
A process changed but the tools didn’t follow. Management approved a new workflow, but the system still enforces the old one. Your team figured out how to make both work simultaneously, usually involving copy-paste, email, or a parallel spreadsheet.

According to PwC, 41% of COOs cite limited collaboration across operational functions as a top-three barrier to delivering on their strategy. Workarounds are often the symptom of that disconnect — each team solving its own problems independently, outside the shared system.

When Do Workarounds Become Dangerous?

A workaround that one person uses for one week is a reasonable fix. The problem is that workarounds rarely stay temporary. Research on business process workarounds shows that undetected workarounds tend to become institutionalized — embedded in how the organization operates, even when nobody planned it.

Here’s when they cross from practical fix to operational risk:

When they live outside the system of record. If your real operational data sits in someone’s spreadsheet instead of your ERP, your reports are wrong. Decisions made from incomplete system data compound the problem — and you won’t know until something breaks.
When they depend on one person. If only one team member knows how to run the Monday reconciliation workaround, you have a key-person dependency disguised as a process. When that person is on vacation, the process stops.
When they create handoff gaps. A workaround in procurement that skips a system step means finance doesn’t see the record until it arrives manually. These are the same process handoff failures that cause delays and errors downstream.
When they multiply. One workaround spawns another. The spreadsheet that tracks exceptions needs its own reconciliation, which needs its own email chain, which creates data outside the system that nobody maintains. Each layer adds hidden cost.

What to Do About Them

You can’t fix what you can’t see. The first step is mapping where your team actually works versus where the system says they should.

Ask your team directly. “Where do you use a spreadsheet or email to do something the system should handle?” Most ops teams can list five to ten workarounds in a 30-minute conversation. They’ve been waiting for someone to ask.
Audit for data outside the ERP. Shared drives, personal spreadsheets, chat threads with operational data — these are your workaround markers. If critical information lives outside the system, there’s a process gap underneath it.
Prioritize by risk, not annoyance. The workaround that wastes 20 minutes a day is frustrating. The one that puts wrong data into invoices or customer commitments is dangerous. Fix the risky ones first, even if the annoying ones are louder.
Close the loop in the system. The goal isn’t to punish workarounds — it’s to understand what they’re solving and build that capability into your tools. A good ERP adapts to how your business actually works, not the other way around.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an operational workaround?

An operational workaround is an informal process your team creates to bypass a gap in the official workflow or system. Common examples include tracking data in personal spreadsheets, using email chains as approval workflows, or manually copying information between systems. They solve immediate problems but create hidden risk when they become permanent.

How do workarounds affect ERP data quality?

Workarounds pull operational data outside your ERP, which means your system of record becomes incomplete. Reports and dashboards show only part of the picture, leading to decisions based on partial information. Over time, the gap between what the system shows and what’s actually happening widens.

How do you identify workarounds in your operations?

Ask your team where they use tools outside the main system to get work done. Look for shared spreadsheets, recurring manual emails, and processes that depend on one specific person. Any time someone says “we do that outside the system,” you’ve found one.

How Tier2 Keel Adapts to Your Real Workflow

Keel was built for the reality that business processes change faster than systems get reconfigured. Its workflow engine lets you adjust approval rules, add new process steps, and modify business logic without waiting for a development cycle — so the system catches up to your team instead of the other way around.

When your operations span leads through invoicing and settlement in a single platform, the workarounds that come from disconnected tools lose their reason to exist. Your team stops building parallel tracking because the primary system covers what they need.

See how it works or book a walkthrough.

Every workaround is a signal. It tells you exactly where your system stopped matching your business. The question isn’t whether your team has them — it’s whether you know where they are before they become the process.