Systems that do not talk to each other: how integration works and what you gain

The sign that you need an integration

It is almost always the same scene: somebody in admin spends several hours a week moving data from one place to another. That is not their problem, it is a design problem, and it can be fixed.

• Online shop orders are keyed into the business system by hand
• The same customer exists in three systems under three different names
• Someone exports to a spreadsheet every month to reconcile two systems
• The warehouse and the website say different things about the same product
• Clocked hours get retyped for payroll
• Reports take days because data must be pulled from several systems

The three ways to connect two systems

The clean route is the API: the system offers a documented door for data to enter and leave in real time. We use it whenever it exists, because it is stable and does not depend on anyone dropping a file in the right place.

Where there is no API — common in long-serving business systems — you work with file exchange: one side leaves a file on a folder or server, the other picks it up and processes it. Less elegant, but reliable if you handle properly what happens when a file arrives malformed or does not arrive at all.

And when several systems are involved, a middle layer that receives from all of them, translates formats and distributes makes sense. It costs more up front, but it avoids six crossed connections that break every time someone updates something.

What to decide before writing any code

Integrations fail almost always over the same badly answered questions. Who wins: if a customer exists in two systems with different details, which one is authoritative. How often: real time, hourly or once a day, since each option has a different cost. And what happens on failure: if the other system is down, do you retry, queue, or alert someone?

That third question separates an integration that lasts years from one that needs watching every day.

What you gain beyond saved hours

The time saved is the first thing people notice, but it is not the most valuable part. What really changes is that the data stops contradicting itself: one stock figure, one customer record, one report everyone reads from. From there you can make decisions using the numbers instead of arguing about which system they came from.

The error rate changes too: a figure that is not typed twice cannot be mistyped twice.

How we do it at iDeo Networks

We build custom integrations between business systems, online shops, in-house applications and cloud services. We always start by checking what each system genuinely allows, because that is where the real scope comes from, not from the brochure.

We cover the whole of Spain, including the Canary and Balearic Islands, Ceuta and Melilla, and we also work with Spanish branches of international groups that need their local system to fit the corporate one.