Retyping 300 lines a day between two systems

Challenge

Two systems, bought a decade apart, with no connection between them. Each afternoon the warehouse system printed a movements report; each afternoon someone in the office typed those lines into the finance system by hand. Around three hundred lines, ninety minutes, and a typo rate you would expect from a human doing exactly that.

Both vendors quoted for a proper integration. Both quotes were larger than the problem, and one required an upgrade the warehouse was not ready for. So the printer stayed, and the workaround became the process — the way workarounds do.

Approach

I looked for the narrowest bridge that would survive without attention. The warehouse system could already write a scheduled export to a folder. The finance system could already accept a specific import file. Neither vendor calls that an integration, but between the two sat a small mapping problem: account codes, units, and a handful of item numbers that existed in one system and not the other.

The mapping table is a spreadsheet the finance team owns and edits, because they are the ones who know when a code changes. Anything the mapping cannot place is held back and reported rather than guessed at.

Result

The transfer runs each afternoon and finishes in under a minute. Unmatched lines — usually two or three a week — go to a short exception list instead of being typed in wrongly. The ninety minutes went back to the person who was doing it, and the printed report is still available on request, though nobody has asked for it since March.