Use case
When systems do not talk to each other, people become the integration. The cost appears as rekeying, as reports that disagree, and as decisions made on numbers nobody fully trusts, not as a line in any budget.
The visible symptom is rarely the cause. These are the underlying reasons we find most often.
Each record has one owning system, data moves between systems without a person copying it, and failures surface immediately rather than being discovered in a month-end reconciliation.
How we solve it
Four to ten weeks for a first integration in production, depending on whether the systems involved offer usable APIs.
For each record that matters (customer, order, invoice) decide which system owns it. Most integration disputes are really this question, unanswered.
Weeks 1–2Including the manual ones. A spreadsheet emailed every Friday is an integration; it just has a person inside it.
Weeks 1–3One integration in production, with error handling and reconciliation, rather than a platform programme that shows nothing for months.
Weeks 3–8Integrations fail quietly by default. Alerting, retries and a reconciliation path decide whether a bad hour becomes a bad quarter.
ConcurrentHow it works
Systems connected by people versus by integration
Before: three systems, each bridged by a person moving data across by hand. After: the same three connected directly through an integration layer, with one declared source of truth per record.
Capabilities
Context
Disconnected systems cap how much work a business can handle without hiring, and quietly erode confidence in its own reporting.
There are still options (scheduled file exchange, database-level integration, or driving the interface) but each is more fragile and needs a named owner and maintenance budget. Treat it as a bridge while a better route is found.
Rarely as a first step. Replacement is slower, riskier and more expensive than connecting what exists. Integrate first; replacement becomes a much better-informed decision afterwards.
When systems do not talk to each other, people become the integration. The cost appears as rekeying, as reports that disagree, and as decisions made on numbers nobody fully trusts, not as a line in any budget.
Disconnected systems cap how much work a business can handle without hiring, and quietly erode confidence in its own reporting.
The same customer record exists, differently, in three systems; Someone exports a spreadsheet weekly so two teams can agree on numbers; Reports from two systems disagree and nobody can say which is right; and A new tool cannot be adopted because it would not connect to anything
Tools bought per team, each solving one problem in isolation; No declared source of truth for any given record; Integrations built once as one-way exports and never maintained; and Systems chosen without asking whether they offer an API at all
Each record has one owning system, data moves between systems without a person copying it, and failures surface immediately rather than being discovered in a month-end reconciliation.
Four to ten weeks for a first integration in production, depending on whether the systems involved offer usable APIs.
Connected
If the before state above reads like your operation, the next step is establishing which part of it is actually costing you. Describe it and we will tell you where connect business systems would and would not help.
