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Making your systems talk to each other
There's a fear that sits under a lot of hesitation about digitalisation, and it's worth naming directly: "we don't want to rip out our ERP and start again." It's a reasonable fear because your accounting system holds years of financial history, your ERP is wired into how production runs and nobody wants to be the person who signed off replacing all of it for the sake of "going digital."
The good news is that becoming a connected company was never about replacement, it's about the plumbing - making sure information moves properly between the systems (and processes) you already have, rather than tearing them out and starting again.
What integration means
Document management and workflow automation don't compete with your ERP or accounting platform for the same job, they sit alongside them doing a job those systems were never really designed for: capturing documents properly, routing them for approval, and then pushing the relevant data into your system of record at exactly the right moment.
Your accounting system stays the single source of truth for your finances, your ERP remains the system that runs production, but what does change is what happens before information reaches them - the capture, the checking, the approval and how automatically it arrives where it is supposed to, once all that's done.
A concrete example
So, let’s go back to our favourite purchase invoice again, since we've followed this one through most of the series. It arrives by email, gets captured automatically, and the key fields are read straight off it. It's then matched against the original purchase order and routed for approval based on value, exactly as covered in the last article. Once approved, instead of someone opening the accounting system and typing the invoice in by hand, the data is posted directly into it via API or XML - supplier, amount, nominal code, VAT treatment, all correctly populated, with the original document attached (or linked to) and retrievable from within the accounting record itself via for example an “F” key.
The accounting system hasn't changed, nobody's had to learn a new place to look for their financial data but, what has changed is that a five-minute manual task, done hundreds of times a month, has become something that happens on its own and, the underlying document is still just a click away if anyone ever needs to check it.
Where this typically connects for a manufacturing SME
The specific systems of course vary business to business, but the common integration points tend to be similar across UK manufacturing SMEs: accounting platforms such as Sage or Xero, ERP systems such as SysPro, Sage 200, SAP Business One or Epicor, and sometimes a CRM handling the sales and quoting side of the business covered back in article 3. Some manufacturers also want a connection into a production or MRP system, so a completed job on the shop floor can trigger the paperwork that follows it.
The exact list of what's genuinely straightforward to connect depends on the specific platforms involved and how they're set up (Cloud, On-Premises, REST API access or application-specific data exchange mechanism), which is worth a proper conversation with your existing IT support or software provider rather than assuming based on what a similar-looking business down the road has done.
Reassurance on complexity
This tends to be simpler than people expect, and it's worth saying so plainly: most of this happens through existing, pre-built connectors and configuration, and often the business logic embedded in your systems is applied to the data that is transported by the integration, not bespoke software development. That doesn't mean it happens by magic, it still needs proper scoping, a clear view of which fields need to map to which, what happens to the data outside or after the process and naturally, rigorous testing before it goes live. But it's a project measured in weeks of configuration not months of development for the vast majority of common UK accounting and ERP platforms.
The genuine risk in this kind of project isn't technical complexity; it's trying to connect everything at once. The businesses that get the most value, fastest, tend to start with a single, high-friction process, usually purchase invoice approval, since it's high-volume and the current manual cost is easy to see - get that working properly, and then extend to the next process once the first one is bedded in and trusted.
Where we go next
Once documents, workflows and your core systems are talking to each other, something else becomes possible that probably wasn't before: seeing, in real time, exactly where things stand across the business - without phoning everyone, Teams chatting or emailing round to ask.
That's real-time visibility, and it's what we're covering in the next article but for now if you haven’t already, please do register for our FREE event – click the link below.
Shaun Turner - Technical Director
