When Your Software Has to Play Nice With Everything

Gary Miller here, and you’d think after all these years I’d stop being surprised by how complicated “simple” requests can get.

So I’m on this video call with Brian, the Chief Information Officer at this international logistics firm based in Dallas. Big operation, trucks and warehouses all over the place, the kind of company that makes the world actually work. We’re in their annual strategy session, and Brian’s got his IT and Operations teams on the call.

The budget’s solid – we’re talking $500K to $750K range, which is exactly the kind of deal that makes my month. Our software would genuinely help them track shipments better, and Brian gets it. He’s nodding along, asking good questions, and I’m thinking this might actually be straightforward for once.

Then Brian drops the bomb: “This all sounds great, Gary, but it has to work with everything we already have. Our warehouse management system, our accounting software, our customer portal, and especially the tracking tool our biggest client demands we use.”

I’m thinking, okay, how hard can this be? We connect to lots of stuff. So I start going through our standard integrations list, feeling pretty confident.

“What about your current warehouse system?” I ask.

“Custom built in 2018,” Brian says.

“Okay, and the accounting software?”

“It’s this specialized logistics thing. You probably haven’t heard of it.”

He’s right, I hadn’t. But I keep going. “And the customer portal?”

“Another custom job. Oh, and it all has to sync with the client’s tracking tool in real-time because they check it constantly.”

I’m frantically messaging our technical team while trying to look calm on camera. The responses I’m getting back are not encouraging. Lots of “we’d have to build that” and “that would require custom development.”

Finally, I have to be honest. “Brian, I need to level with you. We can probably make most of this work, but it’s going to require some custom development. That’s going to add time and cost to the project.”

The Operations director jumps in: “How much time and cost?”

I’m doing math in my head, and it’s not pretty. “Probably another four months and… maybe $200K?”

You could hear the air go out of the room, even over the video call. Brian’s looking at his screen like I just told him his dog died.

“So we’re talking almost a million dollars and eight months total?” Brian asks.

“That’s… probably realistic,” I admit.

The call ended politely, but I knew it was over. They went with a smaller solution that worked with their existing systems right out of the box. Not as powerful as ours, but it actually worked with what they had.

Turns out in 2025, having the best software doesn’t matter if it can’t talk to the dozen other systems your client already depends on. Sometimes the perfectly adequate solution that plays nice with everyone wins over the amazing solution that needs everything rebuilt around it.