Topic 03 / 065 articles
A custom system or a CRM, why quotes differ so much, who owns an integration, and what to do when two systems disagree about the data.
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Collect three quotes for the same internal system and the gap is often a multiple rather than a percentage. That is almost never one supplier inflating a price — usually they answered different questions. How to make quotes comparable.
Integrations rarely break on day one. They break six months later, when the other system changes something and nobody had ever answered the question of who would notice. What to settle before the work rather than after.
Dashboards get commissioned more often than they get used. Usually the request does not mean "we want charts" but "we do not trust the numbers" or "preparing them takes too long". Those are three different problems with three different answers.
There are three routes, not two: buy a standard product, connect what you already use, or build the part that is genuinely yours. This guide assesses all three against the same criteria, and treats the cost of leaving as a first-class question rather than an afterthought.
An integration does not break when the connection drops. It breaks when two systems quietly show different things. This guide covers how duplicates appear, why retrying without an identifier is dangerous, and how to agree in advance which system counts as the truth.
The services this topic is relevant to.
Custom business systems and customer portals with clear workflows, access permissions, integrations and a phased approach to data migration.
API and systems integrations: the source of truth, duplicate prevention, retries, monitoring and who owns the integration after handover.
