ERP Integration Services

What ERP integration actually connects

Your ERP holds the financial truth: items, customers, vendors, open orders, inventory by location, receivables and the general ledger. The trouble is that the work which creates that truth happens somewhere else. Sales reps live in Salesforce or HubSpot, online orders arrive from Shopify or BigCommerce, a 3PL or warehouse system ships them, technicians close jobs in a field app, and payroll runs in ADP. ERP integration is the plumbing that carries each of those events into the ERP and carries the results back out.

Tepia usually frames the work around three business cycles. Order to cash covers the customer, the sales order, fulfillment, the bill and the payment. Procure to pay covers requisitions, purchase orders, receipts and vendor bills. Record to report covers journal entries, intercompany activity and the data that feeds month end close. Naming the cycle tells everyone which records move, in what order, and who notices when something breaks.

Consider a regional distributor. Reps close deals in Salesforce, trade customers reorder through a B2B web store, and a third party warehouse ships everything. Without integration, an office team retypes every order into the ERP, emails tracking numbers to customers and answers calls about stock that the store showed as available yesterday. With integration, the order lands in the ERP in seconds, the warehouse receives it automatically, and the store shows stock that matches the ERP within minutes.

Deciding which system owns which record

Before Tepia connects anything, we agree on a system of record for each type of data and a direction for each flow. Skipping this step is the most common reason integrations create duplicate customers and orders that drift out of sync. A typical mapping for a company running an ERP, a CRM and an ecommerce store looks like this:

Tepia documents this in a field mapping workbook that finance, sales operations and IT all sign. It records every field, its transformation and what happens when a value is missing, so the rules survive staff turnover and the next vendor can read them.

Integration patterns Tepia uses

There is no single right way to connect an ERP. Tepia picks the pattern per flow based on volume, urgency and what the ERP exposes.

• Direct API calls for low volume, high urgency events such as creating a sales order the moment a customer checks out.
• Prebuilt connectors or an iPaaS when a well supported connector already covers a standard flow, such as Shopify orders into NetSuite, and your rules are simple.
• Custom middleware when several systems share the same records and you need queuing, retries and one place to monitor everything. See our middleware and integration layer page.
• File and EDI exchange for trading partners and older systems, including EDI 850 purchase orders and 856 advance ship notices.
• Scheduled extracts into a reporting warehouse, covered in our data integration and ETL work.

Tepia also designs for the ERP’s limits. NetSuite meters script usage and concurrent requests, Dynamics 365 Business Central throttles API calls, and older on premises systems may only accept nightly files. The design respects those limits from day one rather than discovering them during the first busy season.

How Tepia approaches ERP integration

Tepia runs its six phase process on every integration, with a US based project manager accountable from kickoff to support.

1. Discovery: a system investigation of the ERP, CRM, store and warehouse, interviews with finance, sales operations and the warehouse lead, and a third party integration review of every available API. Deliverables are an Investigation Summary, an Interview Summary and User Stories such as a rep seeing a credit hold before promising a ship date.
2. Design: the field mapping workbook, sequence diagrams for each flow, error handling rules, and wireframes for the sync monitoring screen your team will use.
3. Development and Testing: builds against ERP sandbox accounts, an Alpha with historical orders replayed through the integration, and a Beta running in parallel with your current process while totals are reconciled daily.
4. Training: sessions for finance and operations on reading the sync log, fixing a rejected record and retrying it.
5. Launch: data migration of open orders and customer matches, cutover on a quiet day, and support reps watching the first full cycle.
6. Support: issue resolution, bug tracking and feature requests such as adding a new sales channel.

Typically Discovery takes 1 to 3 months, development and QA 2 to 6 months, and launch about a month. See our process for detail.

Choosing an ERP integration partner wherever you are

Buyers often search for integration consultants in their own city, whether that is Chicago, Seattle, New Jersey, Ohio or Reno. Location matters less than time zone overlap and accountability. Tepia has offices in Costa Mesa, Tampa, Pittsburgh, Austin, Las Vegas and Kansas City, works US hours with US based project management, and serves companies across the country remotely, with in person workshops where they help.

Whoever you hire, ask these questions before you sign:

• Who writes the field mapping, and will you own it as a document?
• Do they build and test in an ERP sandbox, and how do they reconcile totals during a parallel run?
• What does a failed record look like to your staff, and who gets alerted?
• Who owns the code, the credentials and the cloud account when the project ends?
• Who supports the integration when the ERP or the CRM ships an update?

Tepia answers each of these in writing during Discovery. Our guide on choosing a systems integration partner goes deeper, and you can browse our work or talk to Tepia about the systems you need connected.

Frequently asked questions