Engineering Financial Control Around a Legacy ERP

The Client: Modernizing Finance and Operations Without Replacing the Core System

Our client is an established manufacturing and e-commerce business operating on SysPro as its core ERP. The company manages payroll, commissions, inventory, production, and executive reporting across a complex operating environment.

Over time, critical workflows developed outside the ERP through spreadsheets, manual data extraction, recurring calculations, and reconciliation work. The underlying system remained functional, but the surrounding processes became increasingly dependent on human intervention. Finance and operations teams were spending significant time moving data between systems, validating calculations, and assembling reporting that SysPro did not provide in the form the business needed.

The Context: Extending the Capabilities of a Functional ERP

The client did not need to replace SysPro. The challenge was efficiently integrating the growing number of important business processes taking place around it.

Several recurring points of friction had emerged:

• Manual Financial Processing: Payroll and commission workflows depended on spreadsheet refreshes, manual calculations, and repeated review. Important financial logic was distributed across processes requiring significant human involvement.
• Fragmented Inventory Visibility: Raw materials, committed inventory, work in progress, and finished goods were not consistently surfaced through a single operating view, increasing reconciliation work for purchasing and production.
• Executive Reporting Overhead: Month-end reporting required finance personnel to collect, validate, transform, and distribute information across multiple business entities and operating processes.
• Disconnected Operational Data: SysPro contained much of the data required by the business, but it was not readily available for custom internal workflows. Each new use case risked becoming another spreadsheet, export, or standalone process.

The Intervention: Building a Reusable Finance and Operations Layer

Rather than replacing the ERP, Gun.io built a self-hosted data, workflow, and application layer around the existing SysPro environment. The objective was to preserve the core system while creating a flexible platform for workflows SysPro did not handle well on its own.

1. Live Payroll Processing: Payroll workflows were rebuilt around current company data rather than repeated manual preparation and spreadsheet manipulation. This created a more consistent process for recurring payroll activity and reduced dependency on manual data handling.
2. Commission Calculation and Reporting: Commission calculations and payout reporting were moved into a structured workflow using a more consistent underlying data source. During implementation, the team identified missing source data in the existing Excel-based process, exposing a control issue that had been difficult to detect in the legacy workflow.
3. Inventory Reconciliation and Visibility: New workflows were developed for raw-material reconciliation, work-in-progress visibility, and finished-goods reporting. The resulting model distinguished more clearly between physical inventory, committed material, production inventory, and completed goods.
4. Executive Reporting: Month-end reporting workflows were redesigned around the same underlying data foundation, reducing repeated extraction, transformation, and validation steps required to produce recurring financial information.
5. Reusable Internal Infrastructure: Direct SysPro data extraction and transformation were incorporated into a self-hosted workflow and application environment. Rather than building each process independently, the client now has a common technical foundation that can support additional finance, operational, executive, and product workflows.

Technical Highlights

• Direct SysPro Integration: Data is extracted and transformed directly from the ERP for use across internal finance and operational applications.
• Self-Hosted Workflow Infrastructure: Internal workflows operate through a reusable application and integration layer instead of disconnected spreadsheet processes.
• Centralized Calculation Logic: Payroll and commission workflows use structured calculation processes built around consistent source data and repeatable review.
• Inventory Data Modeling: Inventory workflows distinguish between physical inventory, committed material, work in progress, and finished goods.
• Extensible Application Foundation: The same environment can support additional internal applications without rebuilding the integration model or infrastructure layer for every project.

The Result