We’ve asked lots of technical consultants what slows ERP or CRM projects down, and keep hearing the same themes: hidden logic, tribal knowledge, legacy decisions buried under layers of custom work, and documentation that’s out of date before it’s even opened.
Across hundreds of hours of conversations with SIs, architects, and design partners, a pattern emerges: most teams are changing business-critical systems without a trustworthy way to see what already exists.
What we’re seeing across the board is: the absence of living documentation.
Static Documentation Was Never Designed for Living Systems
ERP and CRM environments evolve daily. Say you have a Friday night script patch, a field added “temporarily, or a workaround deployed under pressure. By Monday, the project document is already wrong.
One SI partner said:
“They have no idea what the hell is there.”
In most inherited NetSuite or Salesforce orgs:
- No one knows which scripts are actually active
- No one can trace how custom objects interact
- Multiple workflows overlap silently
- Integrations contain hidden logic
- Past SIs left behind no consistent trace
As another consultant put it:
“Every developer, every system integrator… they’re super messy.”
Not because they’re careless, but because ERP/CRM platforms have no mechanism that keeps documentation synchronized with deployed reality.
Static documentation will always be behind.
Living documentation stays in sync.
What Living Documentation Actually Means
Most people hear “documentation” and think of Confluence pages, PDFs, or screenshots of workflows from six months ago.
Living documentation is something else entirely.
It is:
- Generated directly from the real system state
- Updated automatically, not manually
- A visual mirror of what’s truly deployed
- A shared source of truth across technical and non-technical teams
- A trace of every decision, change, dependency, and impact
- A way to ensure no work happens inside a black box
One SI leader summed up why this matters:
“When big chunks of the native process are a black box, everything slows down.”
Living documentation reopens that box.
Why the Industry Is Moving This Direction
After dozens of in-depth sessions with SIs, architects, and enterprise teams, three themes appear consistently.
1. Reverse-engineering is consuming talent
Most firms spend 30–60% of early project effort just figuring out what’s already in the environment.
That’s hundreds of hours of exploratory work before anything meaningful can begin.
And when things are undocumented?
One consultant put it simply:
“You touch some code here, and it breaks something in a totally different place.”
Living documentation surfaces those dependencies immediately.
2. ERP & CRM environments are becoming more modular and more fragmented
As platforms expand through marketplace apps, automation tools, and custom metadata, logic sprawls across:
- Scripts
- Workflow engines
- Integration middleware
- Automation platforms
- App-specific settings
- Custom objects
Static documentation can’t represent that complexity.
Living documentation can, because it’s generated from the system itself.
3. More stakeholders need visibility, not fewer
Modern enterprise systems aren’t written and owned solely by developers. Today, visibility is needed by:
- Admins
- Architects
- QA
- Ops
- Analysts
- Business owners
- External SIs
- Internal developers
Each needs a different view of the same truth.
Living documentation is the layer that makes that possible.
The Missing Layer: A System of Record for Change
The ecosystem already has monitoring tools, version control tools, and note-taking/documentation tools.
What’s missing is the connective tissue, a system of record for change that shows:
- The real-time truth of the system
- How it evolves
- What each change actually impacts
- How the environment fits together
That is the gap Splotch’s platform is built to close. But the need extends beyond any single tool. It’s an industry shift.
Dynamic systems require dynamic documentation. Anything less creates risk, rework, and unnecessary friction.
A New Standard for ERP/CRM Delivery
For years, the industry has accepted a contradiction:
We build dynamic, mission-critical systems…and document them with static artifacts that never update themselves.
That contradiction is finally breaking down.
The shift toward living documentation is so necessary. It solves the root cause of so many project failures: teams couldn’t see what they were actually working with.
Just as version control transformed modern software engineering, living documentation is on track to redefine how ERP and CRM systems are delivered, governed, and maintained.
And soon, we’ll look back and wonder how teams ever worked without it.