Integration planning

Design ERP Data Flows That Can Be Operated and Supported

An interface is not complete when data moves once. It is complete when ownership, timing, validation, failure, recovery, monitoring, and audit evidence are understood.

Define the business flow

Name the source of truth for each customer, vendor, item, price, order, payment, journal, and status.
Document the trigger, direction, frequency, expected volume, and timing requirement.
Map fields, values, transformations, defaults, and reference-data dependencies.
Explain the accounting, operational, reporting, and control impact.
Assign business and technical owners.

Design for failure and recovery

Validate required fields, duplicates, totals, status, and referential integrity before posting.
Define retry behavior and prevent duplicate transactions.
Route rejected records to an actionable queue with clear error messages.
Set alert thresholds and escalation paths for delay, failure, and unexpected volume.
Retain enough detail to trace a transaction across systems.

Secure and test the interface

Use least-privilege service accounts and controlled credential rotation.
Protect sensitive data in transit, at rest, in logs, and in support tools.
Test expected transactions, exceptions, duplicates, missing references, outages, and replay.
Reconcile counts and control totals between source and target.
Load-test realistic peak volumes and time-sensitive close processes.

Prepare cutover and support

Sequence interface activation with migration, master-data ownership, and transaction freeze windows.
Define monitoring dashboards, daily checks, and month-end reconciliation.
Create runbooks for common failures and manual fallback.
Confirm who owns vendor tickets and cross-system diagnosis.
Review changes through an integration impact checklist.

Operational rule

If finance or operations cannot see that an integration failed, explain what was affected, and identify who will resolve it, the integration is not production-ready.