Every mature SAP estate has a ghost story.
Not the kind that lives under the bed.
The kind that still runs in production at 02:00 every morning.
Written by somebody who left years ago.
Last week was about the person who stays.
This one is about the ones who left.
And the strange thing is that they never quite did.
When you buy an old house, there is usually a door frame somewhere with pencil marks on it.
Names. Dates. A line for every year a child grew.
People you will never meet, who lived there long before you did, and who left their mark where nobody thinks to look.
The system that has run the business for twenty years has that door frame too.
It is just not in the kitchen.
Open the custom code and look at who wrote it.
Then look at the current staff list.
The names do not match.
That 02:00 job. Written in 2014 by somebody who has not been in the building since.
An interface nobody will touch, because the one person who understood it has retired.
A report the finance team swears by, built by a contractor whose surname nobody can quite remember.
I have handed over SAP landscapes like this.
I have inherited them.
I once stood in a server room and realised that the most important person in the building had not worked there for six years.
For a long time I treated it as a fact of life.
People leave. Systems stay. That is the deal.
Then I noticed something odd.
The organisation had forgotten these people.
The system had not.
Every object carries its author. Every change carries a date.
The system has been keeping its own staff list, longer and more accurate than the one in HR’s filing cabinet.
So when a project is commissioned to work out who knew what, and why something was built the way it was, we assemble a room full of people and ask them to remember.
The ghosts signed their work.
Nobody reads the signatures.
The door frame is right there.
Nobody reads it.
The ERP estate remembers people who no longer work here.
First published on LinkedIn, 27 October 2026.