Capture as-is processes during ERP discovery, not after
The moment this page is about is narrow. A functional consultant is sitting with a business process owner in a fit-gap workshop. Nothing has been configured. The job in that hour is to establish how the process actually runs today, including the spreadsheet in the middle of it and the person who checks something by hand every Thursday.
The consultant is doing three things at once: asking questions, listening properly, and writing down enough to reconstruct a diagram later. The third one is what suffers.
Wavelength is a voice to diagram tool that builds a process map live while someone talks it through. On an ERP program that means the as-is map exists by the end of the workshop, corrected by the person who does the work, not a week later in an inbox.
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The as-is is the input to fit-gap, and it is still captured badly
As-is mapping is not optional. It is the input to fit-gap analysis: you cannot decide what is standard configuration, what is a genuine gap, and what is a customization request dressed up as a requirement, without knowing what the business does now and why.
The capture itself is the least engineered part of the program. A consultant takes notes. Two or three days later, between other workshops, they write them up. The diagram goes back for review, and the review sits behind the reviewer's actual job for a week. Across finance, procurement, supply chain and HR, with dozens of processes each carrying that latency, the backlog becomes a structural feature of the discovery phase.
The deeper problem is that the reconstruction happens away from the only person who could verify it. By then the process owner is reading a document rather than describing their work, and reading is a weak way to catch an error.
The customization trap
This is the argument that matters most, and the reason capture quality is a commercial issue rather than a clerical one. Most expensive ERP customizations start as a process step nobody mapped properly.
The pattern is consistent. The business says "we need the system to do X." The consultant writes X into the requirements log. X reaches the gap list. It survives design review, because by then it is a documented requirement with a business owner's name against it and nobody wants to be the person deleting someone else's requirement. It becomes a development item, then custom code that gets regression tested at every upgrade for the next decade.
What nobody established is why X exists. Very often X is a workaround, introduced years ago because a predecessor system could not do something, or a team was short-staffed one quarter, or a report did not exist and a manual reconciliation filled the gap. The constraint went away. The step did not.
The control against this is not a governance forum. It is a picture, drawn during the workshop, that the person performing the step is looking at while they explain it. Once the step is a visible box, "why is that there" is easy to ask and uncomfortable to answer with "that is just how we do it." Often they answer it themselves once they see the loop drawn. A properly captured as-is, validated by the person who performs the step, is the cheapest customization control a program has.
A customization you never requested costs nothing to remove. One that reached the build costs a decade of regression testing.
What capture costs today
| How the as-is gets captured | What it costs |
|---|---|
| Consultant takes notes, writes up later | Days of latency per process, multiplied across dozens of processes. The write-up is a reconstruction from memory. |
| Business owner documents their own process | You get the documented version, not the real one. People describe how the process is supposed to work, because that is the version they can defend. It also arrives late. |
| Record the session | You get a transcript nobody reads, and you still have to draw the diagram. |
| Draw live in a diagramming tool | The consultant stops facilitating. The fit-gap conversation dies while someone drags rectangles on a shared screen. |
| Use the vendor's standard process template | You have documented the software, not the business. The template is what the fit-gap compares against, not a substitute for it. |
What the discovery session looks like instead
- Ask the business owner to walk the process, start to finish, in their own words.
- The map builds while they talk. Steps, systems, decisions and handoffs appear as they are mentioned. You keep facilitating.
- Screen-share it once there is something to see.
- Let them correct it on the spot. People who would never review a diagram will happily correct one in front of them.
- Mark the inferred connections. Anything inferred rather than heard renders differently, so you get a short list to confirm out loud.
- Export it and attach it to the fit-gap log that day.
Unlike Lucidchart, Miro, and Visio, which require you to draw the process map after the workshop, Wavelength builds it live during the session, so the client validates the as-is process in the room instead of two weeks later in a review cycle.
See how to run a process mapping workshop and how to document a current state process.
Volume is the real argument here
One process mapped live saves an afternoon. That is an efficiency, not an argument. Forty processes mapped live across a discovery phase is a different claim, because it removes a leg from the critical path rather than shortening one.
Discovery runs long for a boring reason: workshop, write-up, review, rework, sign-off. The write-up and review legs hold most of the calendar time, serialised against consultant and business availability. Collapse both into the workshop and the phase stops being paced by document turnaround.
Where it fits by phase
- Discovery and fit-gap. Capture the as-is in the room and leave with something the business has corrected.
- Design. Draw the to-be next to the as-is, so the gap list is visual and each configuration decision stays traceable to a step.
- UAT scenario design. The as-is map is what tells you which exception paths need a test case. Scripts written from the to-be cover the happy path.
- Training and cutover. The business gets a picture of how their work changes, rather than a manual organized by transaction.
Running the program rather than the workshops: for technical project managers. Advising across client programs: for IT transformation consultants. Team limits are on the pricing page.
Where this does not fit
Wavelength does process and data flow. It does not produce BPMN 2.0 with correct symbology, which matters more here than elsewhere, because many ERP programs mandate BPMN or a vendor's own standard such as SAP Signavio or Oracle's implementation method. Capture the shape in the room and formalize it in the modelling tool after. Redrawing from an agreed diagram still beats modelling from a page of notes.
It does not do UML, entity relationship diagrams, data models or field-level mapping, integration architecture diagrams, or RICEFW tracking. Those belong in other tools.
It is not a process mining tool. It does not read event logs out of the ERP. If you have clean event data, Celonis or an equivalent will tell you things a workshop cannot: variant counts, rework loops, real handoff times. Much of ERP discovery is not like that, because the process runs across systems, spreadsheets and conversations that leave no usable log.
It will not rescue a session with bad audio either. A hard-surfaced room with six people talking over each other produces a poor map. Record it and paste the transcript afterwards instead: see transcript to flowchart.
The short version
Signavio holds the process repository. Celonis mines event data. Wavelength covers the hour before either of those has anything to work with.
Common questions
How is this different from process mining tools like Celonis?
Process mining reads event logs out of the systems you run and reconstructs what actually happened, including variants nobody would admit to in a workshop. Wavelength does not touch event logs. It captures what a person says in a room, which is the only source for processes that live in email, spreadsheets and phone calls.
Does Wavelength export BPMN?
No. Wavelength produces process and data flow diagrams, not BPMN 2.0 with correct symbology, and it exports images and editable flows rather than BPMN XML. Where a program mandates BPMN, capture the shape in the workshop and formalize it in the modelling tool after.
Can it handle SAP, Oracle or Dynamics terminology?
It diagrams what is said, so module names, transaction codes and document types come through as spoken labels on the nodes. It does not know your configuration and will not tell you whether a step is possible in standard.
What about client data confidentiality on a client site?
Check it against the program's tooling policy first, like any other cloud tool on a client engagement. Audio is processed to produce the transcript and the diagram. If cloud transcription is not approved for that client, do not use it in the session.
Can the business process owner correct the map themselves?
Yes, and that is the point. Share the flow and they can edit nodes and connections directly, or screen-share and make the corrections as they call them out. Validation happens while the person who does the work is still in the room.