1. Why Integration Is the Biggest Hidden Bottleneck

• Every department buys its own software (ERP, CRM, e-commerce, BI).

• Information silos slow decisions and duplicate effort.

• Hidden costs: person-hours in reconciliations, lost sales from inconsistent data, reputational risk.

2. Benefits of Integrating Your Enterprise Systems

1. Real-time 360° visibility—everyone sees the same “single source of truth.”
2. End-to-end automation—no re-typing, no human errors.
3. Scalability without scares—add a new channel or subsidiary without rebooting everything.

Key fact: mature integrations cut time-to-market for new features by up to 50 %.

3. Principles to Connect Without “Breaking What Works”

• Build on what already works—modernise around trusted systems.

• Outside-in integration—tackle one critical process first and show visible value.

• Clear contracts, loose coupling—version APIs/events and document to avoid fragile dependencies.

• 24/7 observability—logs, traces, and metrics accessible to both business and IT.

• Security by design—encryption and audited access controls for compliance.

4. A Four-Step Fast Track

5. Integration Patterns & When to Use Them

6. 60-Second Case Study

Latin-American retailer, 7 disconnected platforms

• Pain: failed promotions, “ghost” stock.

• Solution: microservice + inventory events in Kafka.

• Impact: stock errors ↓ 92 % in 3 months, online sales ↑ 15 %, campaigns launched in days.

7. Metrics the Board Actually Cares Abou

• Time-to-market for new features

• MTTR on data incidents

• Availability of key data (SLA)

• Integration cost per system

8. Next Step: Start with a Quick Win

1. Pick one high-pain, high-ROI process.
2. Define what data must flow and how often.
3. Run a 4-6 week pilot and measure before/after.

Download our free 15-point Integration Maturity Checklist and find out where to start.

Mitch Skolnik

Community Manager
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