Systems that pass data to each other without a person in the middle
Interface design across ERP, CRM, finance and operational systems. Middleware selection, data migration, and the error handling that nobody scopes until the night it matters.
The spreadsheet between two systems is a permanent employee
Every mid-market company has one. An export from one system, a transformation someone built years ago, an import into another. It runs monthly, it takes a day, and one person understands it.
It survives because integration projects get scoped around the happy path. Two systems, one direction, matching records. Then real data arrives: the duplicate customer, the credit note with no matching invoice, the record that fails validation at three in the morning with nobody watching.
The interesting engineering in integration is not moving the data. It is deciding what happens when the data is wrong, who finds out, and how the two systems get back into agreement afterwards.
What the work covers
Interface mapping
Which systems need to know what, in which direction, and how quickly. Most integration backlogs shrink at this stage, because a good share of proposed interfaces turn out to be reporting problems.
Middleware and iPaaS selection
Whether you need a platform at all, and if so which one. Assessed on the same independent basis as any other systems selection, because a platform decision is harder to reverse than an interface.
Interface build and testing
Field level mapping, transformation logic and validation, tested against real data volumes and real edge cases rather than a clean sample.
Error handling and reconciliation
What happens to a record that fails, who is told, how it is retried, and how you prove at month end that both systems agree. This is the part that determines whether an integration is trusted.
Data migration
Extract, cleanse, map, load, reconcile. Including the decision about how much history to bring, which is a business decision that gets made by default far too often.
Monitoring and handover
Alerting that reaches a named person, documentation your team can act on, and a support arrangement that does not depend on us being available.
What you end up holding
Named artefacts, handed over. Not a slide deck summarising them.
- Interface catalogue covering direction, frequency, volume and owner
- Field level mapping and transformation specifications
- Error handling design, including retry, alerting and manual intervention paths
- Reconciliation reports that prove the systems agree
- Migration plan with cutover sequence and rollback position
- Monitoring dashboards and runbook documentation for your team
When to call us
Any one of these is enough. You do not need a defined project first.
- Someone spends a day a month moving data between two systems by hand.
- Finance and sales report different numbers for the same thing and both are reading their own system correctly.
- An integration was built by a contractor who has left, and nobody wants to touch it.
- You are about to buy a system and nobody has asked how it will talk to the ones you keep.
- An interface fails silently, and you find out from a customer rather than from an alert.
An assessment, not a proposal
Two to four weeks at a fixed price, delivered as a decision document. You own the output whether or not you carry on with us.
Start with an assessmentWe are an independent consulting firm. Software vendors do not pay us, so our recommendations come with the scoring behind them.