Two-way sync between CRM, ERP, email and operations tooling — so a record entered once is correct everywhere, and no one is the integration layer.
The copying. When two systems hold the same record and neither is authoritative, someone spends their week keeping them agreed — and the data is wrong anyway.
The cost shows up as time, but the damage shows up as decisions made against stale records. Integration replaces the person in the middle with a defined flow: which system owns which field, what happens on conflict, and what happens when one side is unavailable.
No. Integration work assumes you keep the systems you have.
Replacing a CRM is expensive, disruptive, and rarely the actual problem. The usual problem is that three systems each hold part of the truth. That is solvable without a migration.
They are common, and they are workable — through scheduled exports, file drops, database access, or whatever the system does expose.
Older line-of-business software is often the exact place manual work accumulates, and it is usually still automatable. The integration is less elegant, but the hours saved are the same.
Thirty minutes on a call is usually enough to tell whether this is the right shape for it.