How to Choose a Systems Integration Partner

Most integration failures are ownership failures

When an integration goes wrong, the code is rarely the root cause. More often nobody decided whether the CRM or the ERP owns a customer’s billing address, so both systems edit it and the last write wins. Or the integration was built, handed over and never watched, and a silent failure left two hundred orders missing from the warehouse queue for a week. Tepia treats ownership as the first design decision on every integration project.

A strong partner asks uncomfortable questions in the first meeting. Which system creates a customer? Which one assigns the order number? What should happen when a product exists in Shopify but not yet in NetSuite? Who on your team gets the alert at 2 a.m., and what are they allowed to do about it? If a candidate jumps straight to connector names, they have not done this enough times.

Capabilities to score in every candidate

Use this table to compare partners side by side. Ask for evidence on each row, such as a redacted mapping document or a screenshot of a monitoring dashboard. Tepia shares both during Discovery.

iPaaS, custom middleware or direct APIs

The right partner recommends the lightest tool that will hold up. Zapier and Make work well for low volume automations owned by operations staff: a new form entry creates a CRM contact, or a closed deal posts a message to Microsoft Teams. They struggle with high volume syncs, multi step transactions, complex transforms and strict audit requirements.

Custom middleware, typically Node.js, .NET or Python services on AWS or Azure with a queue in the middle, fits when you sync thousands of records an hour, need ordering guarantees, or must keep an audit trail for finance or compliance. Direct point to point API calls make sense for one simple connection but turn brittle once five systems talk to each other. Tepia often mixes all three in a single client estate, with middleware at the center and lighter tools at the edges. Compare the options in Zapier vs custom integration and middleware and integration layer development.

How Tepia approaches systems integration

1. Discovery: system investigation of each platform’s APIs, limits and sandbox access; interviews with the people who rekey data today; and a third party integration review. Deliverables are an Investigation Summary with the system of record matrix, an Interview Summary and User Stories such as an order flowing from Shopify to NetSuite to the warehouse.
2. Design: the mapping document, sequence diagrams for each flow, and wireframes for the monitoring dashboard and replay screen.
3. Development and Testing: an Alpha against sandboxes and a Beta on a subset of live records, with test plans for duplicates, partial failures, exhausted limits and user acceptance by the teams who own each system.
4. Training: sessions for operations staff on reading alerts and replaying failed records, using real failure scenarios.
5. Launch: backfill of historical data, cutover from manual rekeying or old connectors, and support reps watching the first weeks of traffic.
6. Support: issue resolution, bug tracking and feature requests as new systems join, with quick response when a vendor changes its API.

More on the service itself at systems integration services and the Tepia process.

What you should own when the integration is finished

An integration partner’s real product is not the code but your ability to run what they built. Before signing, ask each candidate to list exactly what you will hold at handover, and compare the lists. Tepia hands over the following on every integration engagement:

• The mapping document, kept current, showing every field, its owner system, its transform and its validation rule.
• Source code and infrastructure definitions in your repository and your AWS or Azure account, not the partner’s.
• Credentials under your control, with service accounts created in your systems and secrets stored in your vault.
• Monitoring and alert rules routed to your team, with a replay screen they have already practiced on.
• Runbooks for the common failures: an expired token, a vendor outage, a rejected record and a bulk backfill.
• A change guide explaining how to add a field or a new flow without breaking existing ones.

A partner that resists any item on this list is planning for you to depend on them indefinitely. That may suit some buyers, but it should be a choice you make knowingly, not a surprise in year two.

Questions that reveal real integration experience

• Which ERP and CRM APIs have you worked with in the last year, and what surprised you about each?
• Walk us through the last time a sync failed in production. How was it found, and how long did recovery take?
• How do you keep sandbox test data realistic without copying production personal data?
• What happens when a vendor deprecates an API version in the middle of a project?
• How will our team add a field to an existing flow after you hand it over?

Good partners answer with dates, systems and specific fixes. Tepia’s work spans ERP integration, webhooks and event driven integration and connected products such as Maximum Controls, an iOS, Android and admin portal for gate control and IoT access. Talk to Tepia about the systems you need connected.

Frequently asked questions