What an ERP Integration Costs in Hours Per Week

Running an ERP to EDGEBIC integration costs roughly twenty to thirty minutes of clerical time per week once the masks are built, plus a one-time setup of a single mask-building session and a day or two of data correction. The recurring number is small because the effort scales with the number of files rather than the number of rows, and because a saved mask reduces every later run to two clicks.

EDGEBIC by User Solutions reads ERP data through saved Excel, CSV, and database import masks rather than a certified connector. That design decision is the reason the time budget looks the way it does, so this post separates the one-time cost from the recurring cost and names the four things that push the recurring number up.

The one-time cost, by task

Setup is front-loaded and finite. Nothing on this list repeats.

The line that surprises people is the fourth one. An ERP export carries the routing and the demand well. It rarely carries how many identical machines a work center really holds, which shifts it runs, or which changeovers are expensive. Those get entered once, and they are the difference between a plausible schedule and a correct one. The work center list you build when the ERP has none covers the worst version of this, where the export carries nothing usable at all.

Building a mask itself is genuinely fast. A mask remembers the entity type, the file format (Excel workbook, or comma, semicolon, tab, or space delimited text), whether the first row holds headings, whether text values are quoted, and how each column maps onto a target field. You build it by dragging headings onto fields. The step by step version is how to build an import mask.

The recurring cost, by task

Here is where the weekly number comes from, for a shop running one Monday cycle.

Two structural reasons keep that number flat. Every row returns exactly one outcome (Created, Updated, Reused, or Failed), so verifying a run means reading four numbers rather than scanning rows. And master data that already matches comes back Reused and untouched, which is why a re-import of 2,000 unchanged products costs the same attention as a re-import of 20.

The scheduler run is deliberately not in that table. Importing changes data and scheduling changes the plan, and the two stay separate so an import can never silently rearrange the floor. Time spent looking at the resulting schedule is not integration overhead, it is the work.

What is not on the list

Three costs that a coded integration carries do not appear here at all.

• No credential management. The scheduler never authenticates against the ERP, so there is no integration user to create, review, or rotate.
• No install inside the ERP. Nothing is promoted from sandbox to production, so your change control process is untouched.
• No version pairing. There is no connector whose supported release list has to match both systems, which is why an ERP upgrade is a checklist rather than a project. The specifics are in what to check after an ERP version upgrade.

The four things that grow the number

The weekly figure is stable in most shops. When it is not, the cause is usually one of these.

An export definition nobody owns. Report writers get edited by people answering unrelated questions. A heading rename costs two minutes to repair and twenty minutes to find if nobody knows which masks read which file. Freezing the export under a name that says it feeds scheduling removes most of this. The repair itself is covered in handling an ERP export that changed column order.

Importing everything every time. Products and work centers change monthly, routings change on an engineering change, work orders change daily. Refreshing all of them on the same cadence adds runs without adding information. Match the cadence to the change rate instead: deciding import frequency by data type works through the split.

Splitting the routine across two people with no handoff. When the export owner and the import owner are different people with no written order of operations, the routine stalls whenever one is out. One named owner and one written backup is the whole fix, and who owns the import routine sets out the duty split.

Skipping the count check to save four minutes. This is the only item that saves time in the short run and costs hours later. A run where every master-data row comes back Created rather than Reused means the key column moved, and the catalog just doubled. Four minutes of reading counts prevents an afternoon of cleanup. The full pass is the import reconciliation checklist.

What the time replaces

Most shops evaluating this are not starting from zero effort. They are starting from a spreadsheet that gets rebuilt by hand, usually two to five hours a week of re-keying, plus the rework whenever a due date moves. The integration does not add twenty minutes to that. It replaces the re-keying with a repeatable routine and leaves the judgment.

The lineage argument is worth one line. User Solutions has been moving ERP data this way since 1991, across 35+ years and shops including the US Navy, GE, BAE Systems, and Cummins. At Plastilite Corporation the ERP vendor itself recommended User Solutions scheduling, and the team went from first export to a complete optimized schedule in 5 days. That is the shape of the setup cost when the exports already exist.

The annual costs nobody budgets

Three items fall outside the weekly rhythm and belong in the yearly figure.

An ERP upgrade. Roughly one hour, spent confirming that the exports still carry the same headings and that a sample import returns Reused rather than Created. That is the whole exercise when a mask-to-export map already exists.

Next year's shift calendar. About an hour, before the first schedule that crosses into the new year, plus a few minutes each time a shutdown or holiday is confirmed.

A quarterly cross-training run. Twenty minutes, four times a year, so a second person can run the cycle when the planner is out. It is the cheapest insurance on the list.

Together those add up to roughly five hours a year on top of the weekly routine, which is the number worth quoting when someone asks about ongoing maintenance rather than ongoing operation.

Budget it against your own files

The fastest way to replace these estimates with your own numbers is to time one cycle. Export this week's work orders and one routing file, then bring them to a working session. Mapping them live usually takes minutes, and the run that follows gives you a real duration for your data volume rather than an average. The architecture behind the estimate is on the EDGEBIC ERP integration page, and the engine those files feed is on the EDGEBIC product overview.