When your systems are “not broken enough” to replace, but too costly to ignore

The quiet tax of “manual integration”

Many business owners describe their systems in the same way: “It works… until it doesn’t.”

On paper, everything is there: an ERP or accounting system, a warehouse tool, an e-commerce platform, maybe a CRM, plus a collection of spreadsheets that hold everything together. Individually, none of these systems are completely broken. Together, they create a quiet tax on the business.

Orders take longer than they should because data has to be copied.
Finance and operations spend hours reconciling “whose numbers are correct”.
Senior staff become the only people who know how information really flows.

This is the everyday reality of manual integration. It does not make headlines, but it shows up in margins, stress levels, and the difficulty of scaling.

The hidden risk in “rip and replace”

When frustration peaks, the natural reaction is: “Let’s scrap this and move to one modern system that does everything.”

Sometimes that is necessary. Legacy technology, poor vendor support, or regulatory requirements can force a major replacement. But for most mid-market businesses, going straight to a full rip-and-replace carries risks that are easy to underestimate.

Execution risk – the project takes longer, costs more, and cuts across every department.
Learning curve risk – productivity drops before it improves as teams adapt.
Operational risk – core flows like order-to-cash or purchase-to-pay are disturbed.

From a CFO or COO’s perspective, the key question is not “Is the new system better on paper?” but:

“What happens to our cashflow and service levels while we are changing systems?”

Start from flows, not from software

A more practical first step is to shift the question. Instead of asking, “Which system should we buy next?”, ask:

Which flows actually make or lose us money?
Where do hand-offs between systems create delay, error, or re-typing?
What has to be entered twice today that should only be entered once?

In most organisations, the real bottlenecks sit at the boundaries: between e-commerce and ERP, between warehouse and finance, and between “the system” and the spreadsheets that staff quietly maintain.

If we start from flows, rather than from software products, a different strategy appears:

Keep the systems that are good enough.
Connect them more intelligently.
Remove the most painful manual work step by step.
Stabilise today’s business while preparing for tomorrow’s platform decisions.

Where cloud and AI genuinely help (and where they don’t)

There is no shortage of buzzwords around integration: cloud, APIs, iPaaS, AI, and so on. They are all useful — in the right place.

Cloud and modern integration tools give us better ways to move and validate data:

Automating key interfaces instead of relying on exports and uploads.
Building audit trails so finance can trust where numbers come from.
Monitoring exceptions instead of waiting for month-end surprises.

AI has a role too, but not as a magic layer on top of broken processes. Used well, it can help analyse patterns in errors and delays, turn messy notes and diagrams into clearer documentation, and accelerate the drafting of small automation pieces that are then reviewed and hardened.

What it cannot do is decide, on its own, how your order-to-cash flow should work, how risk should be controlled, or how people in your business need to change the way they work. Those questions sit with management, not with a model.

A different kind of systems conversation

For many growing companies, the challenge is simple to describe and hard to solve:

The systems are not yet “disaster level” enough to justify a full rebuild.
But the current way of working clearly will not scale for the next five years.

That is the space where integration, sequencing and governance matter more than picking another brand of software.

A useful conversation with your leadership team might be:

Which two or three flows would hurt us most if they failed for a week?
How many of those flows currently rely on re-typing or heroic individuals?
What would it look like if each of those flows were supported by cleaner, more joined-up systems?

If those questions resonate, the next step is rarely a shopping trip for a “perfect system”. It is a deliberate, staged effort to make your existing landscape work together, and to make sure that when you do change platforms, the business is ready.