A logistics business had three systems that needed to agree with one another — a transport management system, a warehouse system, and the ERP that the finance and planning teams lived in. Each worked on its own. The trouble sat in the spaces between them, where orders, stock movements and statuses had to flow reliably or the whole operation drifted out of sync. The in-house developers were capable, but none of them had built an integration of this shape before, and learning it on a live freight operation was not a risk anyone wanted to take.
They did not want to hand the whole thing to an outside firm and lose sight of it. They wanted one person who had done this kind of work, sitting inside their team, building something the team could maintain afterwards.
What the gap really was
- The integration sat across three systems, each with its own quirks and failure modes.
- Getting the data flows wrong would show up as missing stock and mis-billed freight, not a tidy error log.
- The in-house team had the platform knowledge but not the specific integration experience.
- Whatever was built had to be owned and run by that team once the specialist left.
How we approached it
We placed a senior integration developer who had built TMS, WMS and ERP connections in anger before, and knew where they tend to break. That experience is the difference between an integration that handles the awkward cases and one that works in the demo and fails on a busy Monday. They were embedded with the client’s developers, reporting to its technical lead, and accountable for the build rather than handing over a design and disappearing.
Because the point was to leave the team able to run it, the engineer built the connections to fail safely and documented how they worked as part of the job, not at the end of it. We were able to bring in a second pair of hands briefly during the heaviest part of the build, then step back to one, without breaking continuity. We have built systems like these ourselves, which is how we knew what a capable hire for this looked like.
Where it stands
The three systems now exchange what they need to without the manual reconciliation that used to fill the gaps. When the integration developer rolled off, the in-house team understood the connections well enough to extend and fix them, because they had been part of building them. The specialist knowledge did the job it was brought in for and then stayed in the building.