It is good and convenient when everything is laid out on the shelves, planned in advance, taking into account all imaginable and unimaginable details. This is quite common in real life. It occurs, especially when dealing with replicated products that have a century-old history of improvement. For example, with passenger cars. Sometimes you get into some Toyota, look around, buy everything you want, and think: they know how to do everything for people!
But when we are dealing with automation, and even with custom automation, with the automation of a certain unique competitive advantage, there can be no question of any circulations, no mass production. The company lives, and this is already enough in a competitive environment. There is no stability. The market is changing, life is changing, and you need to adjust to new conditions. And we need to automate something again. So the customer called me, and in front of me he was hiring someone else. And we need to integrate what I did with what others did: my predecessors, the customer's partners with their API, and the vendors who supplied the "boxed solution"
And that's okay. You can dream of a single monolithic solution with a single consistent database: enter one once, use all as many times as needed. And you can even see the realization of such dreams. I personally saw it. It was in a company where everything was honed to perfection, almost like McDonald's, and almost like McDonald's, this company had very stable processes, starting from production and ending with sales, 80% of the products were taken by one customer.
Basically, you have to work with independent applications, each with its own database. Data redundancy sometimes leads to contradictions. But integration and modularity allow these contradictions to be eradicated or smoothed out.
What is needed for integration? - we need interfaces from those applications with which the customer wants to establish interaction with the new system being created. If there are well-developed stable interfaces, it does not matter at all what changes the developers of the system with which I integrate make. This is the essence of modularity. In this essence, the Internet grew and expanded. And now we can get any information from any system, from anywhere in the world, if there is an API.
Sellers in some large integrator companies are hereditary revolutionaries: "We will destroy the whole world by force to the ground, and then we will build our new world ..." In practice, the old world cannot be destroyed to the ground, because the customer suddenly realizes that a couple more bold steps, and his company will sink into Oblivion. Well, the new world at the stage of deployment and implementation turns out to be not so heavenly as the sellers painted at the tender. And we need to somehow integrate the remnants of the old world with the functionality of new technologies.
Against the background of these grandiose companies, "... my sail is white, so lonely against the background of steel ships...". I am just a little tailor who can sew the patches of your coat tightly so that it is warm and cozy to work
If you need to robotize part of the process, reduce the amount of manual labor, and integrate the resulting solution with another system to further reduce the amount of manual labor, write to me, we will discuss, calculate, maybe even agree...