Cross-tool workflow agents bridging an ERP, a CRM, and three legacy portals.

01 — Client context

A €1B-revenue logistics operator running an on-prem ERP, a sales CRM, and three regional carrier portals — all stitched together by a 22-person operations team copying data between tabs. Two SI-led integration projects had been written off in the prior five years.

02 — Operational problem

The cost wasn't the duplicated work — it was the SLA breaches and customer credits that happened every time a handoff was missed. Leadership needed orchestration that survived legacy schemas, partner API outages, and a procurement function that wouldn't approve a rip-and-replace.

03 — System designed

A workflow-orchestrated agent layer sitting beside the existing stack — not on top of it. Agents owned bounded operational journeys (booking confirmation, exception triage, invoice reconciliation), each with explicit retries, idempotent state, and a human approval gate at the right step.

04 — Implementation shape

• Six-week discovery embedded in the operations control room
• Three pilot journeys selected by combined revenue-at-risk and integration tractability
• Event-driven middleware deployed in the client's existing infra; no new vendor in the data path
• Operator playbooks rewritten in parallel — the system and the team changed together

05 — Guardrails, evals & governance

• Per-journey circuit breakers tied to upstream API health
• Approval gates calibrated to monetary and contractual exposure, not arbitrary thresholds
• Full event log feeding the existing audit and finance reconciliation pipelines

06 — Measurable result

• $4.1M annualised lift, validated by the client's finance team in quarter two
• SLA breach rate down 73% on the three covered journeys
• Operations headcount held flat against 19% volume growth