Skip to content

How it works

Six stages, and two of them are places to walk away

How the work actually runs, what exists at the end of each stage, and where the commercial boundaries sit.

How projects run

Each stage earns the next one

Nobody can price an integration programme honestly from a phone call, so we do not try. The two stages before any real money changes hands are the two designed to tell you not to bother.

  1. First conversation

    Free · 45 minutes

    Whether there is anything here worth doing at all. Sometimes the answer is that your current setup is fine, or that the problem is a process one and no integration will fix it. We say so on the call rather than selling you a review.

    You can stop here, and some people should.

  2. Review

    Fixed price · planned at three to four weeks

    Every system mapped, every path the data takes today written down, and the manual handling costed in hours and errors. You get the target architecture and a sequenced, costed plan — and it is yours to keep whether we build it, your team builds it, or someone else does.

    You can stop here, and some people should.

  3. Build

    Fixed price, scoped from the review

    Built in your own cloud account, defined in infrastructure code, delivered in working increments. The first flow runs in production within weeks, not at the end — so you are checking real behaviour against real partners long before go-live.

  4. Cutover

    Included · planned at one to two weeks

    The old way and the new way run in parallel, on the same real traffic, until the numbers agree. Then we switch. There is a documented way back at every step, and we do not cut over into a Friday or a peak trading week.

  5. After go-live

    Included · the first full trading month

    Closer support through the first full trading month, when the edge cases actually show up — the odd purchase order, the partner who changes a format without telling anyone. Every fix becomes a runbook entry instead of knowledge in someone’s head.

  6. Run and support

    Monthly fee · thirty days’ notice

    Monitoring against your trading hours, change as you add partners and channels, and a console where your own staff resolve data problems without waiting on us. Internally we call this keeping the lights on. Leaving takes 30 days and you keep everything.

Cutover and the weeks after go-live are inside the build price, not billed on top. They are the two stages that get quoted separately and the two where an integration actually fails, so pricing them as extras would put our interests on the wrong side of yours.

What you actually receive

Artefacts, not activities

A list of what a consultant will do is not a deliverable. These are the things that exist at the end of each stage, that you keep, and that another firm could pick up and continue from.

Review

Planned at three to four weeks · fixed price

  • A current-state map: every system, every interface, every manual step between them
  • The cost of the manual handling, in hours per week and in errors per month
  • A target integration architecture, with the trade-offs named rather than hidden
  • Architecture decision records — the reasoning kept, so it can be revisited rather than re-argued
  • A sequenced, costed plan, each item risk-rated
  • A written answer to whether this is worth doing at all

Build

Planned in months · fixed from the review

  • Working flows in your own cloud account, first one live within weeks
  • All infrastructure as code, in your repository, deployable by your team
  • Field mapping held as configuration, not buried in code
  • A test pack run against your partners’ real systems before go-live
  • An operations console your staff can use without training
  • Runbooks written as the work happens, not assembled at the end

Run and support

Ongoing · monthly

  • Monitoring aligned to your trading windows and partner cutoffs
  • A monthly written report: what ran, what failed, what was changed
  • Data errors resolvable by your own staff, without raising anything with us
  • New partners and document types added at rates agreed in the support schedule, not re-quoted each time
  • A maintained credentials inventory and partner-contact list
  • Thirty days’ notice, and everything already in your hands

Before you ask

The questions we get asked first

Start with a review, not a proposal

Tell us how the data moves today. If a review is not the right first step, we will say what is.