Your middleware lead approves the iPaaS rollout after the vendor shows clean mapping screens and a 99 percent uptime SLA. The first week the connectors run full-table refreshes that overwrite every in-flight order change the warehouse made that morning.
The platform prices delta detection as an extra module, so the team ships without it. Sales teams keep updating the ERP through mobile terminals, yet the AI forecasting engine only ever sees the last complete batch that finished at 2am.
Three weeks later the model starts recommending bulk purchases of items that sold out hours earlier. Finance notices the mismatch first because the cash-flow projection still assumes yesterday's closing stock.
The vendor support ticket points to a configuration flag that only works when both source and target systems expose the same change-tracking schema. The ERP does; the legacy WMS does not, and the connector simply skips those records.
Your ops manager now runs a daily manual reconciliation script to patch the gaps. Headcount that was meant to shrink with automation instead grows to babysit the sync jobs the platform was bought to eliminate.
The contract renewal discussion arrives next quarter. The renewal price includes the delta module that should have been standard, plus extra consulting hours to rebuild the mappings that already broke once.
Fix it by forcing every new connector purchase to include field-level change capture in the acceptance criteria before any licence is signed. Test the first sync against a live transaction log, not a curated demo set.