Workplace Integrators: When the CRM and SAP Couldn't Talk

The Problem

Workplace Integrators ran their sales pipeline in a modern CRM, but their actual bookings, deliveries, and financials lived in SAP on a DEC system. The two systems never spoke. Every morning, sales leadership had to ask operations what had actually shipped. Operations had to manually extract data from SAP, reconcile it against CRM entries in spreadsheets, and produce reports that were already stale by the time anyone read them.

• Sales couldn't see which quotes had converted to orders, or which orders had shipped
• No early warning when orders were at risk of missing targets
• Accounting couldn't do historic lookups without pulling archived files
• Every department built its own shadow spreadsheet to fill the gap

The Approach

We started by mapping what each department actually needed to see — not what the systems could already produce, but what decisions they were trying to make. We interviewed sales, operations, accounting, and executive leadership to define the metrics that mattered.

Then we built an automated extraction layer that pulled data from both the CRM and the DEC-hosted SAP instance, normalized it, and landed it in a unified SQL database.

What We Built

• Unified data pipeline: Automated daily extraction from CRM and SAP into a single SQL reporting database
• Department-specific dashboards: Published on the company intranet with role-based views — executives saw summary KPIs, managers could drill into team performance, sales reps tracked their own order status
• Explorable reports: Every high-level number could be expanded for underlying detail — no more calling accounting to ask "where did this number come from?"
• Morning digest emails: Automated daily emails pushed to managers with their key stats, so they started the day informed instead of hunting for data
• Historic lookup for accounting: Full transaction history now queryable on demand, replacing the manual archive retrieval process

The Outcome

• Sales stopped guessing. They could see booked vs. delivered in one view, updated daily.
• Managers received their stats without opening a spreadsheet.
• Accounting gained self-service historic lookups.
• The "morning reconciliation ritual" — the daily scramble to figure out what happened yesterday — disappeared.