Seven systems. Six of them right.
Most businesses do not have a bad system. They have several good ones holding part of the same truth, with nothing deciding which is authoritative.
Thirty minutes · no predetermined package
Which of these is actually your problem?
Six sentences. The one that sounds like your week decides which page to read next.
API integrations
Field ownership, validation at the edge, deduplication and alerting.
Go to api →Business automation
The sequence written down, then enforced by the system rather than remembered.
Go to business →AI agents and assistants
An assistant that opens the conversation and hands back when a human should have it.
Go to ai →Salesforce development
Read the org, decide what stays, and remove what nobody can account for.
Go to salesforce →HubSpot consulting
Optimise, extend, integrate or leave — and usually the first one.
Go to hubspot →Platform work
Upgrade paths, app sprawl and account ownership, each with its own page.
Go to platform →What a disconnected stack looks like from inside.
A recurring calendar reminder exists whose only purpose is moving data between two systems.
Two systems hold the same customer and neither is authoritative.
An integration broke silently and the first sign was a number that looked wrong at month end.
The platform is right and the setup is fourteen years of exceptions nobody documented.
Reporting stops at the boundary of one system, and the question spans four.
Somebody is paid to do a job a rule could do.
Six questions before connecting anything.
The first one is the whole job. The rest follow from how it is answered.
Five stages, and the map comes first.
Map what exists
the diagramEvery system, what it holds, and which fields overlap. Signed off before anything is connected.
Decide ownership
the rulesPer field, which system wins. This is the deliverable, and everything after it is implementation.
Build at the edges
validatedAccept or reject in-request, deduplicate on the identifiers that matter, and never write silently.
Instrument it
visibleAlerting on failure rate, latency and volume drift, so a break is noticed in minutes rather than at month end.
Document and hand over
operableWhat to do when the other end changes, rotates a credential, or starts rate-limiting.
The systems change. The ownership question does not.
Lending and financial services
Partner feeds, bank data, dialer and servicing, all holding part of the same file.
Home services
Dispatch, financing and accounting, where the job record has to reconcile across three.
Insurance
Carrier portals and rating platforms, several of which have no API at all.
Professional services
Practice management, billing and intake — three vendors, one client between them.
What people ask about integration and automation.
What is systems integration?
Connecting systems so a record created in one appears correctly in the others. The connection is the easy half; deciding which system owns which field when they disagree is the work.
What is business process automation?
Having software perform a sequence a person would otherwise perform by hand. It is worth doing when the sequence is repeatable and a missed step has a real cost.
Where should we start?
With the list of manual steps that happen on a schedule. Anything on a recurring calendar reminder is a candidate, and that list is usually the first project.
Do we need an iPaaS platform?
Use one when the connectors exist and your mapping is close to default. Build custom when the rules are specific to your business or a wrong record costs real money.
How do you stop integrations breaking silently?
Alerting on failure rate, latency and volume drift, plus idempotency so a retry never creates a duplicate. Most breakages we are called about were visible for hours.
Can you work with our existing platform?
Usually, and it is normally cheaper than replacing it. Routing, reporting and automation can sit around a platform rather than inside it.
What if a system has no API?
The honest answer is a structured manual step with a named owner, not a fragile scrape. Several carrier and utility portals fall into this category.
How long does integration work take?
The mapping decision takes longer than the code. Expect the ownership table to occupy the first week, and expect it to change what everyone thought the project was.
Should we automate before or after fixing the process?
After. Automating a broken process makes it fail faster and more consistently, which is worse than the manual version.
Who owns the code and the credentials?
You do. The repository is created in your organisation from the first commit, and access concentrated in a supplier is a failure point we are often asked to fix.
Do you take commission on software you recommend?
No. No commission, referral fee or partner margin, which is what makes the recommendation worth having.
What happens after it is built?
The engineers who built it run it, or hand it over documented. Automation nobody understands is a liability that arrives later dressed as an outage.