Connecting an ERP in eleven days
A week-by-week account of how Volta Cycles went from four disconnected systems to one live flow before peak season.
When Volta Cycles came to us in July, they had systems that did not talk to each other: a storefront, an ERP, a third-party warehouse and two ocean carriers with their own portals. Peak season was eight weeks away. This is how the first flow went live in eleven days.
Days one to three: requirements
We did not start with a specification. We started with a list of the things that went wrong last peak: containers arriving before the warehouse knew, purchase orders closed by hand, customers emailing to ask where their bikes were.
From that list we agreed one flow to build first: carrier bookings and ETAs into the ERP, then on to the warehouse and the storefront.
Days four to eight: build
Both carriers were already in the Quayside network, so the work was in the mapping. The ERP used its own location codes and a custom field for the expected arrival date. We built the flow against real bookings in a sandbox and sent the team a short note for each lane explaining what would happen when a booking changed.
- A new booking creates an inbound shipment on the right purchase order.
- A changed ETA updates the order and the warehouse appointment together.
- A rolled booking pauses and asks the planner, with the next two sailings listed.
Days nine to eleven: launch
We went live with one lane first, Kaohsiung to Rotterdam, and watched the first forty bookings together. Two needed a mapping fix. The rest went straight through. By day eleven, all lanes were live and the operations desk had taken over monitoring.
Eleven days was possible because we built one flow well, instead of four flows halfway.
What changed
Inbound shipments now appear in the ERP within seconds of a carrier confirming them. The warehouse plans receipts around real arrival times, and the storefront shows delivery dates driven by live freight. The second flow, invoice matching, followed three weeks later.
