How do you integrate existing systems into a new digital solution?

What you actually want to unlock

Rarely does anyone ask for "integration" for the word's own sake. Usually you want one clear experience (for customers, employees or partners) that connects to what already lives in ERP, CRM, planning tools, identities, machines or product data. No duplicate data entry, no contradictory figures across two screens, no changes in a legacy system landing days later where someone needs them. The new solution is that connection; a good-looking interface is only valuable if the chain behind it holds up.

Why this so often goes wrong

Legacy is rarely "dumb", but it is from a different era: different concepts, different boundaries, sometimes no ready-made API but exports, messages or fixed connections that you respect or gradually replace. Meanwhile, people expect today's pace. Anyone who syncs connections as an afterthought discovers halfway through that write permissions, conflicts between sources, outages and recovery were never treated as product decisions. What gets called "a quick catch-up" ends up becoming a full rework.

Our approach: integration is part of the product

We map chains straight away, in parallel with UX and the domain model, no glass facade over a bottomless list of assumptions.

From fact to transport: which events and data does the app need to show or drive, where they come from, and how current they need to be (seconds, minutes, nightly). This leads to a deliberate choice for real-time (APIs, events) or scheduled exchange (batch), based on volume and tolerance.
Source and permissions per domain: who is the source of truth for customer, order, asset, contract? What stays read-only? Who approves write actions? Without that clarity, every integration comes back as politics and firefighting.
A facade around unpredictable systems: where a package is slow, unreliable or hard to communicate with, we often place an integration layer between the legacy system and the new app: translating, buffering, retrying and logging errors, without every user action hanging directly on that package.

During Imagine and the start of Create,we define this together with you. That way, the first time with real data is a planned step, not a surprise.