SAP SOAP, case 2
Death by Workaround
An SAP system nobody fully understands. And one person who holds all the keys.
The case
Amy arrives at Sapura Cosmetics on a Monday morning. The coffee is already cold. The brief is thin: four weeks, one deliverable, findings and recommendations. Stabilise the system. Not fix it. The distinction matters more than anyone admits. Meet Amy →
From the outside, everything works. Orders flow. Production runs. Deliveries leave on time. Until, without warning, they don’t.
Behind the scenes, years of urgent fixes have shaped the business into something fragile. Custom logic replaces process. Exceptions become routine. Solutions built to survive a crisis quietly become permanent. And every change leads back to the same name.
Max is not a bottleneck. Max is the system. He carries knowledge no document holds and fixes failures no one else can even see. When production stops overnight and key deliveries begin to slip, everyone waits for him. Nobody asks what happens if one day he cannot fix it.
Amy has no mandate to redesign anything. No budget. No authority. Only a temporary desk and questions that make people uncomfortable. And a harmless interview question that returns with new meaning: can you read code?
SOAP in this case
Amy’s four words: Stabilise. Ownership. Accountable. Protected. She does not arrive with them. They find her. What they mean →
Why SAP people read it
A custom code story. Every workaround starts as temporary. Then the project ends, the consultants leave, and temporary becomes the way things are done.
It is also a very current story. Every developer has their own handwriting. But when only one developer remains and starts vibe coding with AI, the handwriting disappears, and with it any recognisable structure. Spaghetti code on steroids. So who owns a decision once it is buried in code nobody can read?
Death by Workaround is about what happens inside organisations when stability depends on silence, and keeping things running becomes more dangerous than letting them fail. It is for functional consultants first, and for the IT managers and developers who have inherited a system held together by one person’s knowledge. And for anyone who has ever been told not to touch something, because only one person understands it.
You will recognise this place. That is the problem.
Get the book
Death by Workaround
A Detective Story of Technical Debt, AI, and the Decisions Nobody Owned.
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Book 2 in the SAP SOAP series. Reads on its own.
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Published 18 February 2026 by No Tie Generation.
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Paperback, 120 pages. ISBN 978-1-9193089-2-0.
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Kindle ebook. ISBN 978-1-9193089-3-7.
Short enough to finish before the next workaround becomes permanent.