Systems integration

What systems integration means in practice

Nearly every small business ends up with several systems that each do their job well and know nothing about each other: a website, an accounts package, a job or booking system, a spreadsheet somebody maintains. The cost of that is paid in retyping, and in the errors retyping introduces.

Integration is usually cheaper than replacing any of them, because the individual tools are rarely the problem. Web systems integration is the commonest starting point: a website form that creates a CRM record instead of sending an email. Beyond that, start with the piece of data that gets typed more than once. That is where the time is going, it is where the discrepancies come from, and it is generally the shortest route to something that pays for itself quickly rather than eventually.