We stopped Finance being a human pipe between two systems.

The frustration

Finance needed data from an old restaurant system to arrive in a new finance platform in a very particular form. The route involved too much handling, too much checking and too much chance for a tiny inconsistency to become somebody's afternoon.

The pattern

Skilled people spending their day moving information because the systems can't. That isn't judgement. It's an integration problem wearing a name badge.

The solution

Middleware that took the pipe-delimited files, transformed what needed transforming and passed them on in the format the finance platform expected, leaving Finance free to do Finance.

The outcome

More than five thousand files travelled through it. Most of the time nothing interesting happened at all, which is exactly what you want. The one memorable failure was a trailing space after 'Cocktails'.