Engineering releases a change in PLM and someone types it into the ERP. Sales quotes from the CRM and operations ships from a different number. The EDI feed failed on Friday and nobody knew until the customer called Tuesday. Corporate's template rejected the extract again. Every one of these is the same problem wearing a different shirt.
Somebody re-keys because the integration doesn't exist, or exists and isn't trusted, or exists and fails silently. Fixing the re-keying without fixing the trust just moves the error.
Which field, from where, transformed how, required or not, what happens on blank. Without that written down first, the integration is an argument between two teams that never ends.
An integration that was wrong once is re-keyed forever. The only cure is reconciliation — both sides tied to the transaction, every difference explained with proof, until the people stop checking by hand.
The feed stops and the first symptom is a customer, a month-end, or an audit. A feed that goes quiet has to raise an alert, and the reject has to route to a person with the evidence attached.
The coordination is half the job — vendors, corporate, the plant. The other half is refusing to ship a feed you can't prove.
Field-level mapping written down before code exists: source, target, transformation, required-ness, blanks. When corporate's template has 230 fields, we agree on which 230 first.
Idempotent runs, explicit lifecycle states, retries, a log a human can read, rejects routed to a person. If a system has no API, we build one — a read-only API over the legacy database, a file-drop watcher, a front end in front of a green-screen transaction.
Before go-live, both sides tied to the transaction. When batches disagree, the difference is traced and the explanation published with query-level proof — not written off as timing.
A feed that goes quiet raises an alert. Mapping, schedule and failure modes documented so your team runs it without us.
A regulatory clock. A Tier-1 aerospace supplier in France had to exchange structured Factur-X invoices through a certified platform by a government deadline. We owned the field-level mapping from the ERP to the platform — lifecycle states, error handling, every mandated field — across French operations, corporate and vendors on two continents, and scoped ~700 fields down to the 230 that were actually mandatory or conditional.
A corporate deadline. A divestiture put a division's Fourth Shift data on a hard date to land in the parent's Oracle. We built the extract suite against the corporate template, tightened invoice selection to kill duplicate-payment exposure, and reconciled every period discrepancy to root cause with a log the client could read.
A plant that couldn't stop. At a $200M medical device manufacturer on S/4HANA, our principal led the Arena-to-SAP PLM integration while the operation ran at double forecast — because the alternative was engineers re-keying changes into a validated system.
Name them and describe what goes wrong — re-keying, a rejected file, a number that never matches. If one of them has no API, say so; that's not a blocker.
You'll get a straight answer and a tight scope. If we can't help, we'll tell you that too — and usually who can.
