For specialty manufacturers
Before you automate anything, find out whether your ERP will let you
Every conversation about automating quote intake, order entry or AP matching ends in the same place: something outside the ERP has to read from it and write back into it. If that connection does not exist, is not documented, or is not supported, everything upstream of it is a demo. Settle it before anyone quotes you a number, because the answer changes the price of the work by a lot — and you can answer most of it yourself in an afternoon without being a programmer. Five checks, each a yes or a no, then what is actually known about the ERPs in this segment. It is a scoping question, not a dead end.
The five checks
An API is a documented way for one piece of software to ask another for something — a quote, a sales order, a part, an inventory transaction. Nearly everything has something. The question is whether it is usable by a third party with no special relationship with the vendor.
1. Is there public documentation? Search your ERP's name plus "API documentation." You want a public page listing what you can ask for and what comes back, readable without a login. If the only way to find out whether an API exists is to open a support ticket, that is a no. Not a maybe. Vendors who support integration publish it, because publishing it is how integrations get built.
2. Is there an OpenAPI specification? A machine-readable description of the whole interface, usually `openapi.json`, linked from the portal. If it exists, an engineer can see the entire surface of the system before quoting the work. If not, he is discovering it by trial and error while billing you. Best single predictor of whether an integration gets estimated accurately.
3. Is there a sandbox? A test copy with test data a developer can hammer on without touching your live database. Without one the only place to test is production — live jobs, live orders, live inventory. No responsible engineer wants that, and forced into it we build a slower, more cautious process. You pay for that caution.
4. Is authentication documented? Good answers: OAuth 2.0, API keys with defined scopes, service accounts with permissions you can see and revoke, with a worked example. Bad answers: nothing published; a shared credential the vendor emails you; a login renewed by hand; or a scheme nobody can explain, which usually means a database account with full rights. That last one is a security problem as well as an engineering one — an integration that can write anywhere is exposure your supplier quality agreement probably now asks about.
5. Webhooks, or only polling? A webhook means the ERP tells you when something happens. Polling means asking every few minutes. Polling works and it is what most job-shop ERPs support, so a no here is not disqualifying — the design is different and the interval matters. Anyone who cannot tell you which one they are building on has not looked.
Scoring. Five yeses means integration is a known quantity and can be fixed-fee. Three or four means real work with real unknowns. One or two means the honest answer to "what will this cost" is "we do not know yet," and anyone giving you a fixed number is guessing with your money.
What is actually known about the ERPs in this segment
Only what has been independently assessed, and plainly where nothing has been.
Epicor Kinetic has documented, actively maintained integration tooling. NetSuite has a mature API. On either, integration is a known quantity.
E2 Shop System, from ECI, received a third-party Grade D API assessment. The findings map straight onto the checks above: no public endpoint reference, no OpenAPI specification, no sandbox, no documented authentication flow, and a QuickBooks integration repeatedly reported broken (supergood.ai API Report Card, E2 Shop System). JobBOSS², also ECI, shows the same pattern. Four of five checks failing, which is why an ECI product is a scoping conversation rather than a line item.
Global Shop, Infor, ProShop and Made2Manage were not part of that assessment. We have no verified grade for them and will not invent one to fill out a table. If you run one, we run the five checks against your installed version — the vendor's current cloud product and the on-premise version you have run since 2016 are different software.
If the answer is bad
Read-only database access. Most ERPs sit on a database you own. A read-only connection pulls quote history, part history, prior job costs and customer records without writing anywhere, and a read cannot change anything on your floor. That covers most of a quote intake agent.
Supported import and export files. The agent makes the file, a person loads it. Batched rather than live, and it works today on software that will not cooperate any other way.
A conversation with your ERP vendor. Sometimes the API sits behind a license tier or a partner agreement. That is yours to have. We will tell you what to ask for.
And sometimes the answer is not yet. If the ERP will not support a read, will not support an import, and holds your data where nobody can reach it, fix the system of record first. Plumbing that is not there eats the entire margin.
What to do Monday
- Run check 1 on your own ERP. Ten minutes.
- Look for the OpenAPI file on the developer portal.
- Ask your ERP account manager, in writing, whether a sandbox exists.
- Ask who holds the credentials for any integration already running, and what it can write to.
- Confirm whether your maintenance contract is current.
Close
Claude Setup Connect is $3,900, quoted separately from any build, so the integration risk is a number you can see rather than padding hidden inside a build fee. Behind it sits our own rule: we will not quote a fixed fee against an API we have not tested. Not for E2, not for Kinetic. And no build without a Blueprint — $4,900, two weeks, which includes running these five checks against your live system.
Everything we build stays on the office side of the line. The agent does not price a job, commit a lead time, or accept a change order, and it does not touch a machine, a traveler in process, or any quality disposition. Writing back to the ERP means drafting an order for a person to release.
Signet — AI that holds up. A division of Circle Square Consulting, Radnor, PA.