Business result
- What result must the workflow produce?
- When is an order considered accepted?
- When is the automated workflow complete?
Planning checklist · 32 questions
Define the order workflow before you choose the connector.
Use this checklist to turn “send orders to the ERP” into a workflow your operations, ecommerce, finance, warehouse, and technical teams can review before implementation.
Published by Integravia Systems · First published and reviewed September 20, 2026 · Based on the documented TRACE delivery process, not a customer case study.
Why this matters
An order integration is a chain of business decisions.
Moving an order record is the easy part. The design becomes real when the team agrees who owns the order, which conditions must pass, how changes are handled, when fulfillment can begin, and what happens after a partial failure.
Work through the questions with the people who own ecommerce, ERP, fulfillment, finance, customer service, and system access. “Unknown” is a useful answer: it identifies what discovery must resolve.
Use it as a decision tool: if the answers are stable and a native connector supports them, use the native connector. If ownership, rules, access, or exception behavior remain unclear, resolve those gaps before committing to a build.
Workflow boundary
1. Define where the order starts and where the workflow ends.
In-scope handoffs
- Which system captures the order?
- Which ERP entity must be created or updated?
- Which warehouse, accounting, shipping, or customer systems participate?
Source of truth
- Which system owns the order at each stage?
- Who approves the business rules?
- Who owns an exception when automation stops?
Order acceptance
2. Decide what must be true before the ERP accepts an order.
- How are customer accounts matched, created, held, or rejected?
- Which identifier maps a storefront product or variant to an ERP item?
- Where do contract prices, discounts, tax, freight, currency, and payment terms come from?
- Which fields are required, and what should happen when one is missing or invalid?
- Must inventory, credit, address, fraud, or approval checks pass before creation?
- Can one order be split by warehouse, supplier, stock status, or business unit?
Lifecycle rules
3. Plan for duplicates, changes, cancellations, and partial success.
- Which stable business key prevents the same order from being created twice?
- What may change after submission: quantity, address, price, item, hold, or requested date?
- Which system may make each change, and how should conflicts be resolved?
- How are cancellations handled before and after warehouse release?
- What happens if the ERP accepts the order but the warehouse or invoice step fails?
- Which actions are safe to retry automatically, and which require a person?
Fulfillment and feedback
4. Close the loop after ERP creation.
- What releases the order to a warehouse, 3PL, supplier, or shipping system?
- How are backorders, substitutions, partial shipments, and multiple tracking numbers represented?
- Which shipment, invoice, credit, hold, and cancellation statuses must return upstream?
- Which updates should customers or staff receive, and from which system?
- How will the team reconcile orders, shipments, invoices, and statuses across systems?
Production readiness
5. Make failures visible, recoverable, and owned.
- What should be logged without exposing credentials or unnecessary personal data?
- Which failures trigger an alert, and who receives it?
- Where do failed records wait, and what context does the owner need?
- How can an operator replay, correct, skip, or escalate a record safely?
- What test orders cover the happy path, invalid data, downtime, duplicates, changes, and cancellation?
- Who owns credentials, vendor changes, monitoring, documentation, and support after launch?
Architecture decision
Choose the simplest path that meets the operating need.
Use the standard path
Best when it covers the required records, rules, volumes, security, exceptions, ownership, and support model.
Configure and orchestrate
Useful when supported connectors exist but mapping, routing, transformations, and operational controls require coordination.
Build only for material gaps
Appropriate when the workflow needs unsupported rules, legacy access, complex state, or recovery behavior the standard path cannot provide.
Resolve unknowns first
Use an Integration Blueprint when access, ownership, rules, architecture, or migration risk cannot yet be scoped responsibly.
Review the Integration Blueprint →Next step
Turn the answers into an implementation brief.
Record the current workflow, proposed workflow, systems and owners, source-of-truth decisions, order states, field rules, exception paths, volumes, access methods, test scenarios, acceptance criteria, and post-launch owner.
Bring the workflow
Have the systems but not all the answers?
Share the current handoffs, known rules, and open questions. We will recommend a standard connector, scoped proposal, paid Blueprint, or no project if there is no viable route.