Custom Development and ERP, PIM and CRM Integrations
Where most agencies hand you off, we carry on.
Your tools don't talk to each other, and it's costing you more than you think. We build the connections — and the applications on top of them — so your stack runs as one system, including the parts nobody wants to document.
Four steps, in the same order every time — for a reason.
The sequence matters. Every expensive mistake we’ve seen in development and integrations started with skipping step one.
Map
Every system, every field that matters, and who owns it. Most projects turn up a spreadsheet running something critical.
Design
The data model and the contracts between systems, agreed before a line of code, so nothing gets discovered in production.
Build
In slices that ship, each behind a flag and each tested against real data from your systems.
Run
Monitored, alarmed and documented — with the engineers who built it still on the account.
Motion Index Drives
Precision indexing and motion-control products for automotive and industrial lines — a WooCommerce catalog wired for spec-driven buying.
What this looks like in your sector.
What connecting two systems actually involves.
Integration is sold as plumbing and priced as plumbing. In practice most of the effort is not the connection — it is agreeing what the data means and deciding what happens when it is wrong.
Establishing what the systems really hold
Not what the documentation says: what is actually in the fields. Every long-running ERP has a field being used for something other than its name, a convention one person maintains, and records that predate the current rules. This is where integration projects overrun, so we look first.
Agreeing the source of truth, field by field
If price lives in two systems, one of them is wrong at any given moment. Deciding which system owns each field — and therefore which direction data flows — is a business decision, not a technical one, and it has to be made by people who can make it stick.
Choosing the method honestly
A modern API where one exists. A scheduled export where it does not. A database view, a middleware layer, or a file drop where that is genuinely the only reliable option. We would rather build a dependable nightly sync than an unreliable real-time one and call it modern.
Deciding what happens when it fails
It will fail: a record with a missing field, a timeout, a vendor changing a response. The difference between an integration people trust and one they work around is whether failures are caught, logged, retried and reported — or whether they disappear silently and surface as a customer complaint.
Security and access, scoped tightly
Credentials held properly, least-privilege access, encrypted transport, and a clear position on what data leaves your network. Where a security review or a questionnaire is part of your process, we would rather see it at the start than three weeks before go-live.
Testing against real data
Clean test records prove almost nothing. We test with a copy of your actual data, including the awkward records, because those are the ones that break things. Then we run the old and new processes in parallel until the outputs agree.
Handover that survives us
Documented field mappings, monitoring that alerts a named person, and a plain explanation of how to change it. If your team cannot understand it without us, we have built you a dependency rather than an asset.
Staging that resembles production
A place to test with real data and real volumes before anything touches the live system. Integrations that were only ever tried against three sample records fail the first time they meet a month of real ones.
Cutover without a gap
Old and new running in parallel, outputs compared, and a defined point where the old process is switched off — with a way back if it is needed. The risky pattern is a hard switch on a Friday, and it is entirely avoidable.
What it costs to keep running
An integration is not a one-off deliverable; it is a dependency with a maintenance cost. Vendors change endpoints, certificates expire, volumes grow past what a nightly job comfortably handles, and somebody eventually adds a product category nobody mapped. Budgeting a small amount of ongoing attention keeps those from becoming incidents, and it is the difference between a connection your team relies on and one they quietly start working around.
Questions about development and integrations.
Our ERP is old and has no API. Is it hopeless?
No, and this is most of what we do. Older systems almost always expose something — a database we can read, a scheduled export, a reporting service, a file drop. The result is usually a scheduled sync rather than a live one, which for pricing, stock and lead times is normally sufficient. We will tell you plainly when a system genuinely cannot be reached.
How long does an integration take?
A well-documented, modern API against clean data can be a few weeks. A legacy system with undocumented conventions and inconsistent records takes considerably longer, and the discovery phase is what tells us which one you have. Anyone quoting an integration before looking at your data is guessing.
Who owns the code?
You do. It is written into the engagement, and we hand over the repository, the documentation and the credentials. We would rather keep clients because the work is good than because leaving is difficult.
What if the vendor changes their API?
It happens, and it is why monitoring is part of the build rather than an extra. A failing sync alerts us, and for clients on a support plan the fix is covered work rather than a new quote. Without monitoring, the first sign is usually a customer seeing a wrong price.
Will you work with our internal IT team?
Gladly, and usually better than the alternative. Your IT team knows the systems, the constraints and the politics. We bring the web side and the integration experience. The projects that go badly are the ones where the agency and IT are kept apart until integration week.
Can you fix an integration somebody else built?
Often, yes. We start by finding out what it actually does versus what it was supposed to do, which is frequently the whole diagnosis. Occasionally the honest answer is that rebuilding is cheaper than repairing, and we will show you the reasoning rather than just assert it.
Can you connect the CRM as well as the ERP?
Yes, and joining those two is often where the value is. The ERP knows what was sold and shipped; the CRM knows who is being talked to. Connecting them — and the website to both — is what lets you see which marketing produced revenue rather than which produced form fills.