Integration contract
Which data travels, in which direction, how often, and which system is the source of truth for each field.
Solution
Systems Integration
Systems that finally talk to each other.
We integrate the platforms your operation already uses so the data travels on its own, at the right moment and only once — with failure handling, reprocessing and a record of everything that passed through.
01 The problem
Every system has its own version of the truth
What usually happens
- Stock in the storefront and stock in the ERP disagree, and nobody knows which one is right.
- The customer record exists in three places, spelled three different ways.
- An order enters one system and someone retypes it into another to invoice it.
- Financial reconciliation is done by hand, comparing reports from different sources.
- When an integration fails, the record simply disappears — and it is only discovered later.
Signs this is your case
- There is a person whose job is copying data from one system into another.
- The report changes depending on where you pull it from.
- Sales stop when one of the systems goes down.
- The company avoids changing supplier because "migrating would be too much work".
- Nobody can say how many records failed to sync yesterday.
02 What we do
The practices in this solution.
APIs
Consuming and publishing REST APIs, with authentication, versioning and rate limits.
Events
Webhooks and messaging so information arrives at the moment it happens.
Queues
What fails is not lost: it enters a queue and is reprocessed under a retry policy.
Deduplication
Rules to recognize that two records are the same person before duplicating them.
Reconciliation
A routine that compares both sides and flags divergence, instead of waiting for someone to notice.
Observability
A record of every message exchanged, with state, attempt and reason for failure.
Reprocessing
Controlled resend of what failed, without duplicating what already came through.
03 Scope
What you get — and what you do not.
The second column is the one almost nobody publishes. It exists because a scope with a declared limit is the only honest way to agree on price and deadline.
Included
- Integration contract document, with fields, direction and source of truth.
- Integrations deployed and monitored in production.
- Error handling with queue, retry and alert.
- Reconciliation routine between the integrated systems.
- Monitoring dashboard for the exchanges, with history and failures.
- Technical documentation of the interfaces.
- Manual reprocessing procedure, for when it is needed.
Not included
- Licences, API plans or platform costs of the integrated systems.
- Fixing inconsistent historical data in the source systems.
- Integration with a system that exposes no interface, without a separately contracted feasibility study.
- Any guarantee of third-party API availability — it is not under our control.
- Support for running the integration without a maintenance contract.
- Full data migration between platforms, which is a project of its own.
04 When not to hire it
When not to integrate
If one of the systems is about to be replaced, integrating now means building on something that is leaving. If the volume is a handful of records a week, the integration may cost more than the typing it replaces. And if the two systems disagree because their BUSINESS RULES differ, integration does not fix it — it only propagates the divergence faster.
05 Timeline
How long it takes — and what makes it vary.
An end-to-end integration between two systems with mature APIs usually takes weeks, not months. The schedule blows up when the API on the other side is poorly documented, unstable or non-existent — and that is discovered during the assessment, not halfway through the project.
Quality and stability of the APIs involved.
How many entities must be synced (customer, product, order, invoice).
Volume and frequency of the exchanges.
Whether syncing must be real time or batch.
State of the historical data on both sides.
Business rules that differ between the systems.
06 Services involved
Where this solution comes from.
A solution is not a separate box: it is the same services applied to one specific problem.
- Enterprise Systems
- ERP, CRM, integrations and system modernization for your operation. See the service →
- Maintenance & Support
- Support, monitoring and continuous evolution for your systems. See the service →
07 How a solution starts
Before the proposal, the assessment.
A solution is not bought from a catalogue. It starts with an assessment of the real process, and only then becomes scope, schedule and proposal.
- Assessment
- A free initial conversation with the people who run the process.
- Mapping
- The process as it happens today, with the points of loss marked.
- Recommendation
- What to automate, what to integrate and what to leave alone.
- Proposal
- Scope, stages and schedule — after the assessment, never before.
08 Frequently asked questions
The questions people
actually ask.
01Does it have to be real time?+
Almost never. Real time costs more, fails more and is rarely what the business needs. We ask what delay is acceptable for each piece of data — and most of it tolerates minutes or hours with no harm at all.
02What if the supplier's API goes down?+
The integration is designed assuming it will. What does not get through enters a queue, is retried with increasing spacing and raises an alert if it persists. What we do not do is promise the availability of an API that is not ours.
03Do you integrate with any system?+
With any system that offers a documented way to exchange data. When there is no API, we assess the alternatives and state plainly how fragile each one is. A closed system with no interface is a real technical limit, not a lack of willingness.
04Who decides which system is right when the data disagrees?+
That is the first decision of the project, not the last. Every field has a source of truth declared in the integration contract. Without it, integration becomes a silent war between two databases.
05Can you integrate without touching our current systems?+
In most cases, yes: the integration sits outside, consuming and publishing. When something inside one of the systems must change, we say so before we start.
09 Other solutions
What else we solve.
Systems Integration
Shall we talk about
your case?
The first conversation and the preliminary assessment cost nothing. Only then come the scope and the proposal.