The symptoms are consistent enough that we can usually describe a business before we have seen it. Month-end takes a week and a half. Sales quote from one system and invoice from another. Somebody exports stock to a spreadsheet every Friday because the report nobody trusts is faster to rebuild than to fix. Two departments have different customer counts and both are technically correct.
None of that is a software failure. It is what happens when systems are bought one at a time, each solving the problem in front of it, with nothing responsible for the joins. Our work is the joins.
What we actually do
Implement ERP platforms where a business has outgrown its stack — connecting finance, operations, stock and reporting so the same number means the same thing everywhere. Integrate systems you are keeping, which is more common and usually cheaper: your accounting package, your warehouse system and your CRM stay where they are, and we build the plumbing that keeps them agreeing. And migrate the data, which is the part that decides whether any of it works.
We will tell you when integration is the better answer than replacement. A full ERP is the right call less often than vendors suggest, and the wrong time to discover otherwise is nine months in. That judgement is the same one we set out in build versus buy.
Phased, because production does not stop
A big-bang go-live puts finance, production, warehouse and sales through their worst week simultaneously, and every problem arrives at once with no way to tell which caused which. We phase instead: one function at a time, each stable before the next starts, with the old system available until nobody reaches for it.
It takes longer on paper. It is faster in practice, because the alternative includes the month everyone spends recovering. Our food producer case study is a worked example — three companies, five systems, nine months, and production running throughout.
The data is the project
Every integration exposes the same thing: your data is not as clean as anyone believed. Customers exist three times with different spellings, stock codes have a convention that was abandoned in 2019, and two systems disagree about which address is current. Migrating that as-is gives you the same mess in a more expensive place.
So a reconciliation and clean-up is part of the work, not an optional extra, and we would rather have that argument at the start than at go-live. It is the least glamorous part of any project and the one that most reliably decides the outcome.
Signs you are ready for this conversation
Month-end takes more than three days. Someone re-keys the same order into two systems. Your stock figure has to be checked before anyone will quote from it. A report you rely on is rebuilt by hand each month. Or you are about to buy another system, and nobody can say what it will need to talk to.
What you get
A working integration with the joins documented, so the next person can maintain it. A data reconciliation you can check, rather than an assurance. Training for the people who use it daily, not just the person who signed for it. And a named person who answers the phone afterwards, because the first three months after go-live are when it matters most.
