Give the field an owner
At a distributor, sales may maintain customer details in a CRM while dispatch works in an ERP, the system that manages orders. Connecting them sounds straightforward. The first decision is who gets to change the shared information.
Synthetic example: CRM customer C-104 matches ERP customer E-778. Sales has approved a new delivery contact. The CRM owns that field; finance still owns payment terms in the ERP.
The rule: send the approved contact to the matched customer. Change that field only. Leave payment terms untouched.
The result is easy to inspect: dispatch sees the new contact on the right customer, and the finance setting stays the same. If the customer has no confirmed match, hold the update for review. Guessing from a similar company name could send correct information to the wrong account.
This is one-way synchronization. Two-way synchronization also needs rules for conflicting edits. Avoid adding that complexity unless the work requires it.
Make a failed update visible
Now interrupt the transfer. The ERP request times out. Did the update fail, or did it succeed and lose its reply?
Check the destination before declaring failure. A retry must target the same customer, avoid overwriting a newer approved value, and leave a record of what happened.
Keep retries limited. A temporary connection problem may clear; a missing customer match needs someone to fix it. Microsoft’s retry guidance explains this distinction. Name the person who reviews held updates, and agree when an unresolved transfer should trigger an alert.
The useful check is whether each approved change reached its destination. A green “job completed” message can still hide a skipped customer. Before accepting the integration, try a valid update, the same update twice, and an unmatched customer. You should be able to explain all three results.
Match the pace to the work
Dispatch may need a contact change promptly, making an event-triggered update useful. Tomorrow’s sales report may be fine with a nightly load. Both are data integration; they serve different deadlines.
Agree the acceptable delay and how missing updates will be shown before choosing a connector.
Pick one transfer that people keep fixing by hand. Write down its owner, matching rule and failure response. That is a useful first conversation about connecting your systems, before choosing a platform or expanding the work.
Related example: our marketing performance workspace brings customer, campaign and order data together.