The Cost of an ERP That Stands Alone
Most companies do not have an ERP problem; they have an ERP isolation problem. The finance team trusts one number, the warehouse works from another, and the website shows a third. Somebody reconciles them manually, and the reconciliation is itself a full-time job that produces no value.
The symptoms are consistent: orders retyped from the store into the ERP, stock figures that are correct once a day, invoices produced from a spreadsheet, and a month-end close that takes a week because three systems disagree about the same transactions.
Integration removes the retyping and the disagreement. The order that arrives in the store is the same record the ERP invoices, with the same reference and the same totals, because nobody copied it.
What We Connect
- E-commerce platforms: orders, stock, prices, customers, invoices
- Marketplaces: listings, stock, order import, cancellation handling
- CRM: accounts, contacts, quotations, credit status, order history
- Warehouse and WMS: goods receipt, put-away, picking, stock counts
- Logistics and cargo: shipment creation, labels, tracking, returns
- Banking and payments: reconciliation and collection matching
- E-invoicing and government reporting where applicable
- B2B dealer portals with live pricing and credit limits
- Production and MRP data for manufacturers
- Reporting and business intelligence layers
Mapping Before Building
Almost every failed ERP integration failed at the design stage, not in code. The questions that must be answered first are unglamorous but decisive: which system owns each field, what happens when both change the same record, how often each data type genuinely needs to synchronise, and what should occur when a business rule is violated rather than a technical error thrown.
We produce a written data map covering ownership, direction, frequency and conflict rules, and we get it agreed by finance, operations and IT together before development starts. That document prevents most of the arguments that integrations otherwise cause six months later.
Building for the Bad Days
Integrations are judged on how they behave when something fails, not when everything works. Partner systems go offline, rate-limit, change a field, or accept a request and then not create the record.
So we build with queued jobs and retries, idempotent operations so a repeat cannot duplicate an order or an invoice, validation at the boundary, quarantine for records that keep failing, structured logs of every exchange, and alerts that reach a person. Every integration gets a dashboard showing what synced, what failed and what is waiting — so a missing order is answered in seconds, not investigated for a day.
When the ERP Has No Usable API
Plenty of ERP systems in daily use were designed before APIs were expected. Replacing one is a multi-year decision that most companies are right to postpone, so we work with what exists: database-level integration with carefully scoped accounts, scheduled file exchange, or a small adapter service that presents a clean modern API in front of the legacy system.
These approaches need more care around data integrity and change detection, and we document exactly what each one assumes so that a future ERP upgrade does not break things silently.