Many business processes, from HR and finance to customer service, require automated data flows between systems. However, because setting up and modifying integrations requires technical expertise, business users must submit requests to IT and wait for development. This delay prevents them from acting quickly, leading to inefficiencies and lost.

IT departments are responsible for security, infrastructure, compliance, and innovation. Adding integration management to their workload forces them to prioritize, meaning non-critical automation requests get pushed to the bottom of the queue. As a result, companies struggle to keep up with changing business needs, and IT teams become bottlenecks rather than enablers.

SaaS vendors rely on smooth onboarding to start billing customers, but integrations with existing customer systems are often the biggest hurdle. Each customer has a unique system landscape, making every integration a custom project. Delays in getting these integrations live mean delayed revenue and a longer time-to-invoice, which impacts cash flow and customer retention.

Many companies treat integrations as a “black box,” meaning business users and customers have no visibility into how data moves between systems. When errors occur—such as missing data or failed transactions—users don’t know what went wrong, leading to frustration. They often assume the problem lies with the SaaS vendor or IT team, even if the issue originates in their own data or configuration.

Because integrations are complex and opaque, troubleshooting problems requires direct involvement from IT or SaaS vendor support teams. This increases operational costs, as highly skilled technical staff must spend time identifying and resolving issues. Over time, the growing demand for support strains resources and reduces scalability.