4 min read
Integrate before you build
Most businesses already own the software they need. What they lack is the plumbing between it.
When a process hurts, the instinctive reaction is to look for new software. A new tool promises a clean start. In practice, the pain usually sits between systems: in the copy and paste from the shop into the ERP, in the export that someone runs every Monday, in the spreadsheet that reconciles both.
Find out where the data is typed twice
A useful first exercise is to follow one business object — an order, a customer, an invoice — from the moment it appears until it is archived. Every time a person types the same information into a second system, you have found an integration candidate. Every time somebody checks whether two systems agree, you have found another.
Decide who owns each piece of data
Integrations fail less often because of technology than because nobody decided which system is the source of truth. Is the customer address owned by the CRM or the ERP? Who wins when both change it? Writing these decisions down is cheap; discovering them in production is not.
Build custom software for the remaining gap
Once the systems are connected, the remaining problems are usually smaller and more specific. That is the right moment for custom software: a focused tool for the part of the process that is genuinely unique to your business, built on top of data that is already reliable.
It is less exciting than a new platform. It also tends to work.