Data Integration Consulting Services for Systems That Need to Agree
Stratiform Group provides data integration consulting services for organizations running several systems that were never designed to work together. We establish what information needs to move between them, how it should be structured and governed as it moves, and what happens when something breaks.
When People Are Doing the Integration
The clearest sign that systems are not properly connected is that someone in your organization is functioning as the connection.
A coordinator opens two applications side by side and types the same customer record into both. A finance analyst exports a file every Monday, reformats the columns, and uploads it somewhere else. A project manager keeps a running sheet because the operational platform and the accounting system count the same job differently and neither can be corrected without breaking something downstream.
These arrangements are quietly expensive. They consume hours that nobody tracks, they introduce errors at exactly the point where nobody is checking, and they create a dependency on individuals who understand which fields matter and which can be ignored. They also fail invisibly. When a record is entered in one place and not the other, nothing raises an alarm. The discrepancy surfaces weeks later as a billing question or a number that will not reconcile.
The other common signal is timing. Teams learn to work around data that arrives late by holding decisions until the overnight run completes, or by making the call early and correcting it afterward. Both are costs, and neither appears in a budget.
Integration Is a Set of Decisions, Not a Set of Connections
Most integration projects that disappoint were scoped as a technical exercise. Two systems needed to talk, a connection was built, and it worked until the business changed.
Durable enterprise data integration depends on decisions made before anything is built:
What actually needs to move. Not everything should. Copying data between systems because it is technically possible creates maintenance burden and new opportunities for disagreement. The useful question is which information a receiving system genuinely needs to do its job.
Which system owns each type of data. When two platforms can both edit the same field, they will eventually hold different values, and there is no principled way to resolve it. Deciding where each type of information is authored, and treating other copies as downstream, prevents that.
How current it needs to be. Near-continuous synchronization is not automatically better. It costs more, fails more visibly, and is unnecessary for information reviewed monthly. Some data justifies it. A deliberate decision per data type, rather than one policy applied everywhere, is what keeps an integration affordable.
How fields map, including the awkward ones. Mapping is straightforward until the systems disagree about structure: one holds a single address, the other holds five; one allows a status the other has no equivalent for. Those cases determine whether an integration is reliable, and they are the ones typically discovered mid-build.
Which integrations are business-critical. An integration that stops billing is not the same as one that delays a dashboard. Knowing the difference tells you where to invest in monitoring and recovery, and where a simpler approach is sufficient.
What happens when something fails. Records will be rejected. A system will be unavailable. A field will contain something unexpected. Whether that gets queued, retried, escalated, or silently dropped is a design decision, and integrations that skipped it are the ones that erode confidence in reporting.
Business Systems Integration
Business systems integration is the broader work of getting your operational applications to behave as one environment rather than several.
For most organizations, that means aligning the platforms where work actually happens.
- ERP and CRM integration so that a customer, a contract, and an invoice refer to the same thing on both sides.
- Finance and accounting systems connected to the operational platforms that generate the activity being accounted for.
- Service and field management systems feeding completed work into billing without a manual step.
- Reporting and analytics platforms receiving consistent inputs rather than each team’s version.
- Custom applications, which are frequently the most business-critical and the least documented systems in the organization.
Alignment is not the same as consolidation. The goal is rarely to reduce the number of systems, which is disruptive and often unnecessary. It is to make the systems you have agree with each other, so that a question about a customer, a job, or a month returns the same answer regardless of where it is asked.
Management Reporting Solutions
Management reporting covers considerably more than the monthly financial pack, and the parts are usually built at different times by different people, which is why they rarely reconcile cleanly.
Stratiform’s management reporting solutions address the full set as one connected environment:
Financial reporting. Monthly and periodic results, consolidations, and the close-cycle work that determines how quickly numbers become available.
Budget-to-actual and forecasting. Variance reporting that reconciles to plan without manual restatement, and forecasts drawing on the same measures as actuals rather than a parallel set.
Operational reporting. Utilization, throughput, backlog, and service levels: the measures that tell leadership how the business is running between financial periods.
Departmental and location-level reporting. Consistent measures applied across functions, sites, and business units so performance can be compared rather than explained.
Multi-entity reporting. Consolidated views across entities with different charts of accounts, systems, or fiscal treatments, without a manual mapping exercise each period.
Board and investor reporting. Packages built on the same governed measures as internal reporting, so the numbers presented externally match the ones used to run the business.
Bringing financial and operational reporting onto shared definitions is usually the point where leadership starts trusting the package rather than checking it.
How the Work Is Built
Once the decisions are settled, the implementation follows from them. APIs where systems expose them properly. Scheduled ETL or ELT processes where they do not, or where volume makes direct calls impractical. Middleware where the number of connections justifies a managed layer rather than point-to-point links that multiply with every new system.
Alongside that sit the elements that determine whether an integration survives its first year: access controls and credentials handled properly rather than embedded in a script, documentation that lets someone else maintain what was built, and monitoring that tells you about a failure before a user does.
Stratiform works across the platforms these organizations run: NetSuite, Salesforce, Sage, HubSpot, Deltek, Microsoft Dynamics, ServiceTitan, the Power BI and Snowflake layers reporting depends on, Fabric where it is in use, and the custom applications that rarely appear on anyone’s list. We do not resell any of them, so the recommendation reflects your requirements rather than a commercial relationship.
Building an Integration Roadmap
Few organizations should address everything at once, and the sequence matters more than the total scope.
A data integration roadmap orders the work by what it costs the business today. Manual re-entry consuming meaningful staff time usually ranks above a delayed report. An integration whose failure interrupts billing ranks above one that populates an internal dashboard. Dependencies also constrain the order: some connections cannot be built sensibly until data ownership questions are settled or a source system is cleaned up.
The roadmap also establishes who does what. Stratiform can build and run the integrations, work alongside your internal developers, or coordinate with the vendors already engaged on individual systems, which is often where integration projects lose time when nobody holds that role.
Where Integration Stops and Other Work Begins
Integration solves a specific problem. Several adjacent ones look similar and are not.
- When the real question is how data should be structured across the whole organization rather than how two systems exchange records, start with Enterprise Data Architecture.
- When integrations already exist but run slowly, break often, or go unwatched, the constraint is usually the technical foundation carrying them: see Data Infrastructure Consulting.
- When the challenge arrived with an acquisition, Post-Acquisition Integration handles the added complications of combining two established environments.
- And when the visible problem is that leadership cannot trust the reports, integration is often one cause among several, which is where Executive Reporting Consulting begins.
Discuss Your Data Integration Roadmap
If people in your organization are moving data by hand, or systems are disagreeing in ways that reach leadership, the practical first step is establishing what should move, what owns what, and what to address first.