Northline Ops

Northline ran nine tools that all held a different version of the truth. Their warehouse system, CRM, approvals process, invoicing and accounting were connected by people. Two full-time staff existed largely to copy data between screens, and every month-end started with an argument about which number was correct.

Nine systems, nine versions of the truth

The audit counted roughly 12,000 manual actions per month: re-keying orders, chasing approvals over email, matching invoices by hand, rebuilding the same report weekly. Worse than the hours was the error rate. Every manual hop was a chance for a wrong number to enter the chain, and by the time it surfaced at month-end, tracing it back took days. One of their systems was a decade old and two previous agencies had said it could not be integrated.

Custom middleware, including for the system nobody would touch

We built a middleware layer that gave every tool one source of truth, with two-way sync so a change anywhere propagates everywhere. Approvals moved into an automated chain with escalation rules. Invoicing and reconciliation now run themselves. And the decade-old warehouse system that supposedly could not be integrated was connected through a custom API adapter, which took nine days.

Error handling first, because logistics cannot pause

Every flow was built with retry logic, failure alerting and a manual override path, because a stuck sync in logistics costs real money. We ran the new system in parallel with the old process for two weeks before switching off the manual chain.

What changed