Making four enterprise systems behave as one

A 1,000+ employee Canadian civil infrastructure and paving contractor, headquartered in Ontario and operating across North America. It runs InEight for construction management, JD Edwards for accounting, Synerion for time and payroll, and Workday for HR. The company grows largely by acquisition and runs each acquired business as a semi-independent unit, which left it with a patchwork of systems and a deep need to keep them coherent.

The company was midway through a major technical transformation: adopting new construction and time-tracking platforms and expanding its HR system. But new systems are only as good as the connections between them, and these had none. Almost every workflow that mattered carried a manual data-processing step. Accounting hand-exported posted costs and payroll transactions to get actuals into the right systems. HR exported employee records to time tracking. Project managers hunted across multiple systems to cost-code jobs correctly. Every hand-off carried delay, and the risk of error.

The gap showed up most sharply around people. When a new employee started, they had to be entered manually into every system they would touch — time tracking, payroll, project management — or they could not be paid and their hours could not be recorded, creating delays from day one. The reverse was worse: when someone was let go, their records lingered until a person removed them by hand, leaving a window in which a former employee could still enter time and be paid. The disconnect was not just inefficient. It was a payroll-integrity and control problem.

Folio did not start by writing integrations. It started by mapping the terrain: what data lived in each system, which system was the source of truth for it, and how every department actually worked. That last part mattered more than it sounds. Because the company runs acquired businesses as semi-independent units, each one does things its own way, especially time tracking, where one department might live in spreadsheets and another in dedicated software. Folio gathered requirements directly from individual teams, surfacing the edge cases that were not visible from the org chart, so each sync could absorb how a team really operated rather than forcing one process on everyone.

Folio owned the integration end to end across all four systems: the mapping, the syncs, QA and testing, training and deployment, and ongoing infrastructure, security, and solution support. One principle shaped every decision. Much of the field workforce is older and has rarely used a computer, on site to build rather than to operate software. So the integrations were built to be idempotent and deterministic, with as little room for user-generated input as possible, so a worker who had never touched a system got the same flawless result as a power user, and a mistimed click could not corrupt a flow.

Over a roughly year-long engagement, that became eleven production integrations, including:

Time entry was the hardest problem in the build, for a structural reason. Because each acquired business runs semi-independently, every department tracks time its own way, one in spreadsheets, another in dedicated software, each with its own rules. The work was not writing one integration; it was understanding how a dozen teams each did the same thing differently and building a single catch-all that absorbed all of it and still landed clean, union-compliant time in payroll.

The CBS sync was the other. A construction project's budget structure is native to the construction platform but simply does not exist as a concept in some of the systems it had to reconcile with. Folio went deep into the underlying APIs to reconstruct that structure and create links between systems that were never designed to share it, so a project created in one place could exist, correctly, everywhere.