ERP Data Integrity Recovery
Found and fixed a 7-year systemic ERP data integrity issue that multiple consultants missed, eliminating an estimated $1–2M/year in manual reconciliation.
The Problem
A mid-market, multi-plant manufacturer had been carrying a systemic data integrity issue for the better part of a decade. For years, the accounting team had quietly handled the resulting discrepancies through manual adjustments, until they retired with no handoff. New staff came on, the numbers stopped adding up, and nobody knew why.
The company brought in consultant after consultant. None of them found the root cause, because they all made the same mistake: they audited the accounting data but never validated the systems producing it. They took the source data at face value.
The actual causes were buried in the ERP's transaction pipeline, a system with roughly 70 entry points and 20–30 processing steps between transaction creation and export to the accounting software. At some point years earlier, someone had built a custom workflow for inventory adjustments. The team using it thought they were adjusting inventory against work orders. In reality, they were adjusting item levels at the plant level, and those adjustments never entered the transaction flow that feeds the accounting system. Every single manual adjustment the inventory team made for years was silently disappearing.
Compounding the problem, an outside consulting firm had also implemented custom parametric products and formulas that produced malformed transactions which never exported. They'd also modified operations routings without filling in the fields needed for accurate costing. And the custom adjustment workflow had no input validation; there were cases where someone had transposed a work order number with a quantity, creating phantom transactions in the billions of dollars that were never caught or cleaned up.
The estimated impact: $1–2M per year in inventory and transaction adjustments that had to be reconciled manually, compounding for seven years.
What We Did
Forensic Analysis
Mapped the ERP's full transaction flow (70+ entry points, 20–30 processing stops) working from mostly nonexistent documentation to understand how transactions were created, transformed, and exported to the accounting system. This is where every previous consultant had stopped short: they looked at what came out of the pipeline without ever examining the pipeline itself. Traced the core issues back to the broken custom adjustment workflow and identified the separate compounding problems from the third-party formula and routing implementations.
Transaction Remediation
Worked with finance leadership and the accounting team to develop a remediation process for the backlog of bad data ahead of month-end close. Built a system that cached and logged the original malformed transactions, applied corrections, and requeued them to the accounting system as if they were the originals, giving accounting a clean audit trail without rewriting history. This replaced the ad-hoc adjustment culture that had been the only option for seven years.
Root Cause Fixes
Fixed the custom transaction flow so inventory adjustments actually enter the pipeline correctly, eliminating the need for most manual adjustments. For cases where manual adjustments are still necessary, added safeguards and validation. No more transposed fields creating billion-dollar phantom transactions.
Worked with engineering to rebuild the third-party parametric formulas using the ERP vendor's own documentation, restoring automated processing for products that had previously required manual intervention on every order. Surfaced the operations routing issues and developed a bridge plan to correct costing data without creating further accounting disruption.