I did a consulting gig some time ago where I had to redo the back-end business processes of a large online bookstore (handling, shipping, credit card approvals,

I did a consulting gig some time ago where I had to redo the back-end business processes of a large online bookstore (handling, shipping, credit card approvals, feedback, internal communications etc. etc.) and not until now do I realise that what these guys should have gotten under normal circumstances was a full-blown ERP system. What I did, however, was simply to go around the different staff and ask them what they did, how they did it, and how they thought it could be done better. Then I made HTML mock-ups and asked them to click around and tell me what they thought. Since these were the people that would actually use the system everyday they obviously had lots of complaints and ideas for doing it better. So we had a few iterations, and ended up with a HTML mock-up that everybody thought would be the best way to do things. The mock-up with comments then served as the specifications, and was easy to implement. They paid me 10% of what they would for an ERP system, and it cut their internal costs by more than 60%. It's all about process.