I’ve sat in reviews where sales opens CRM, finance opens ERP, and the room spends forty minutes reconciling instead of deciding. That isn’t a tooling problem first. It’s an ownership and handoff problem that looks like a data problem.
Pick a system of record for each fact
Customer status, order value, credit hold, delivery date — each needs one owner. When both systems “own” the same field, both will eventually be wrong. Write the rule down. Put it next to the field definition, not in a forgotten wiki page.
Fix master data before you buy another connector
Duplicate accounts, freestyle city names, and missing GST fields break syncs faster than APIs do. Clean the top 20% of records that drive 80% of volume. Then automate the checks that keep them clean.
Map the human handoff
Who creates the lead? Who converts it? Who books the order? Who closes the invoice? If that chain isn’t clear, no middleware will save you. I usually draw the process on one page with names, not job titles only.
Publish one leadership view
Leaders don’t need two dashboards that almost match. They need one agreed pack — with source notes for the exceptions. Once that pack is trusted, arguments drop and decisions speed up.
What “done” looks like
Same customer ID across systems. Same open-order count within an agreed tolerance. A weekly exception list someone actually clears. That’s alignment. Fancy integration slides are optional.