Service 04
Your systems should exchange data, not your staff
Most businesses do not have a software problem. They have a connection problem. The accounting system, the e-commerce platform, the warehouse system and the CRM each hold part of the truth, and a person is quietly employed to keep them in agreement. Integration removes that person from the middle.
- The problem
- The same order is typed into three systems, and when they disagree nobody knows which one is right.
- What we do
- We build an integration layer that moves data between systems on a schedule or on events, with mapping, validation and error handling.
- Business value
- Each piece of information is entered once, arrives everywhere it is needed, and disagreements between systems become visible instead of hidden.
Understanding system integration
System integration is the work of making separate applications behave like one. In practice that means agreeing which system is the master for each piece of data, translating between the different ways each system describes the same thing, moving records reliably, and deciding what happens when something fails halfway.
The technical part is rarely the hard part. The hard part is the mapping: your e-commerce platform calls it a SKU, the ERP calls it an item code with a different format, and the warehouse system has three of them because someone created duplicates in 2019. Good integration work spends real time on that before writing code.
We also treat failure as a first-class concern. Networks drop, APIs rate-limit, and files arrive malformed. An integration that has no retry policy, no idempotency and no alerting will eventually create a duplicate invoice or a missing shipment — and it will do it quietly.
Signals this applies to you
- Businesses running an ERP alongside separate e-commerce or warehouse systems
- Companies whose stock levels differ depending on which screen you look at
- Finance teams re-entering data that already exists elsewhere
- Anyone whose supplier or customer requires a specific file format on a schedule
What Silver Shark can build
Concrete deliverables rather than categories. Most projects combine several of these.
API integration
Two-way connections to REST, SOAP and GraphQL APIs, including authentication, pagination, rate limits and retries.
ERP integration
Orders, items, stock, customers and invoices moved between your ERP and the systems around it, in whichever direction is correct.
Accounting integration
Invoices, payments, credit notes and customer records synchronised so finance stops re-keying what sales already entered.
E-commerce integration
Storefront and marketplace orders pulled in, stock levels pushed back out, and fulfilment status returned to the customer automatically.
CRM integration
Sales activity, quotations and customer records kept consistent between the CRM and the systems that actually fulfil the work.
Payment integration
Payment gateways and bank file formats connected to your order and accounting flow, with reconciliation built in.
Database & SFTP integration
Direct database links, scheduled file exchanges and the fixed-format files that partners and government systems still require.
Legacy system integration
Older applications with no API connected through their database, file exports or a purpose-built adapter service.
Connection methods we work with
- REST, SOAP and GraphQL APIs
- Webhooks and event-driven triggers
- Direct database connections and views
- SFTP, FTPS and scheduled file exchange
- CSV, XML, JSON and fixed-width formats
- Message queues for higher-volume flows
How the work runs
Specific to this service — the general delivery sequence is on every project.
- 01
Agree the system of record
For every entity — customer, item, order, price — one system is authoritative. Deciding this upfront prevents the loops and overwrites that make integrations untrustworthy.
- 02
Map the fields honestly
We document every field, its format, its allowed values and what happens when it is missing. Most integration failures are data quality problems discovered too late.
- 03
Build for failure
Idempotent writes so a retry cannot duplicate a record, dead-letter handling for messages that cannot be processed, and alerts to a named person when a flow stops.
- 04
Make it observable
A log of what moved, when, and what it contained. When someone asks why an order did not appear, the answer should take a minute, not a day.
The sequence every project follows
- 01
Discover
Understand the operation before discussing technology.
- 02
Analyse
Decide what should be removed, automated or built.
- 03
Design
Design the data model and the screens people will live in.
- 04
Build
Build the core in usable stages.
- 05
Integrate
Connect the system to everything else that holds the truth.
- 06
Test
Test with your data and your awkward cases.
- 07
Launch
Go live in a controlled, reversible way.
- 08
Support
Keep it working and keep it improving.
System Integration — common questions
Our system has no API. Can it still be integrated?
Usually yes. Options include reading its database directly, using its import and export files, driving a scheduled export to SFTP, or building a small adapter service that sits alongside it. We assess what is available and what is safe to touch before proposing an approach.
How do you handle data that does not match between systems?
With an explicit mapping layer and a validation step. Records that cannot be mapped are held and reported rather than guessed at, so bad data does not spread from one system into another.
Is real-time necessary?
Less often than people assume. Real-time is right for stock availability and order acknowledgement; a scheduled sync every fifteen minutes or nightly is perfectly adequate for accounting postings and costs less to build and run.
Will integration break when a vendor updates their API?
It can, which is why integrations should be monitored and covered by a support arrangement. We version our integration code against the vendor API version and alert on unexpected responses rather than failing silently.
Can you integrate systems you have not worked with before?
Yes. The methods are consistent across vendors, and if documentation exists we work from it. If it does not, we test against a sandbox or a copy before touching production data.
Next step
Tell us where system integration would help.
Describe the process as it runs today — including the parts that are held together by people. We will tell you what is worth building, what is worth automating, and what is worth leaving alone.