Stop re-keying data between systems

With the handoff that hurts most. We look for the place where someone exports from one system to type into another, because that is measurable, self-contained and usually the single biggest time sink. Fixing one real handoff end to end beats a broad automation programme that never quite lands.

Sometimes, and we will say so when they are the right answer. They are excellent for low-volume, low-consequence connections. They become expensive and fragile when the volume climbs, when a failure needs to retry intelligently, or when the logic branches more than a step or two — and that is when we build the integration properly instead.

It retries, it logs, and it tells someone. Jobs run on background workers with locking so a slow run cannot stack on top of itself, failures are recorded with enough context to diagnose, and anything that stays broken raises an alert rather than silently dropping records. Integrations that fail quietly are worse than no integration.

In our experience it removes the worst hours of existing jobs rather than the jobs. The work that gets automated is re-keying, chasing and reconciling — the parts people are already doing badly because nobody enjoys them. What remains is the judgement, which is what you hired them for.

Carefully, and only after saying so. Options are scheduled file exchange, database-level integration where we control both ends, or screen-level automation as a last resort. Each has a different fragility profile and we would rather have that conversation up front than present a brittle integration as a robust one.