Case Study // Strategic Revenue Ops Acquisition Integration

Post-Acquisition
Integration
Launch

No playbook existed. No integration model had been tested. An acquired industrial supply company needed a live e-commerce storefront wired into an ERP it had never touched ... across eight teams, three vendors, and a system architecture nobody had mapped. The architecture I built held after I was no longer there to run it.

The Evidence

Frameworks
& Artifacts

Four structural deliverables from a six-month integration engagement. Each artifact addressed a specific failure mode the organization had no prior model for handling.

Interactive Framework
System Integration
Sequence Map
The full dependency chain across ERP, tax engine, and payment processor. Every system role, handoff point, and constraint rule mapped into a single visual architecture.
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Governance Framework
Vendor Governance
Model
The control architecture that prevented parallel vendor motion, rogue system installs, and scope boundary violations across three external partners and five internal functions.
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Applied Architecture
Product Taxonomy
Architecture
281 categories built from SKU data, not inherited guesswork. A four-level hierarchy designed for findability, merchandising scalability, and structured data ingest.
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Execution Framework
Cross-Functional
Workback Plan
Eight teams coordinated into a single phased roadmap with dependency gates, escalation paths, and a P0/P1/P2 prioritization structure that prevented scope paralysis.
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The Situation

No Precedent
for What Was Required

The parent company acquired an industrial supply distributor. The mandate was clear: stand up a functional e-commerce storefront integrated with NetSuite and SuiteCommerce. The timeline was aggressive. The complication was structural.

Nobody had done this before inside this organization. No acquisition integration playbook existed for e-commerce. No cross-functional coordination model had been tested. The acquired company operated on legacy processes with no digital commerce infrastructure. The parent company's own teams had never aligned Finance, Distribution, Procurement, Marketing, and IT around a single digital launch.

The work required simultaneous coordination of a third-party NetSuite consultancy, a product information management vendor, a payment gateway provider, a tax compliance engine, internal Cloud Ops, and warehouse operations ... all while defining what "minimum viable launch" actually meant for a B2B industrial catalog with thousands of potential SKUs.

→ Acquisition closes
→ No integration model exists
→ Teams operate independently
→ Vendors make conflicting assumptions
→ Scope expands without governance
→ Launch date becomes theoretical
Pressure Points Surfaced

What the
Diagnostic Found

The integration had six structural exposures. Three were architectural. Three were operational. All were interconnected.

Red
No System Integration Sequence
Three vendors (NetSuite SI, tax engine, payment processor) had no shared understanding of which system moves first, which consumes what, or where handoffs occur. Parallel motion was the default.
Red
Tax Compliance Entirely Manual
Tax calculations entered manually into the ERP. Sales data manually uploaded to the tax engine. 100% manual intervention rate with high compliance and human-error exposure.
Red
No Vendor Governance Model
No single-threaded ownership. No rules preventing rogue system installs. No scope boundaries between the SI partner, internal teams, and third-party vendors.
Yellow
Product Taxonomy Based on Assumption
Leadership dictated four top-level categories without data backing. No L3/L4 depth. No alignment with how customers actually search for industrial supply products.
Yellow
Image Pipeline Schema Unresolved
SuiteCommerce maps images to parent products, not child SKUs. Naming conventions and CSV schemas for bulk upload were undefined. Automation existed but correctness at scale did not.
Yellow
No UAT Infrastructure
Zero test cases, no QA tracker, no accountability model. The team had no way to validate checkout, order creation, pricing logic, or data flow before going live.
The Approach

Build the Rails
Before the Train

The intervention was structural, not managerial. The goal was to create an integration architecture durable enough to survive personnel changes, vendor handoffs, and timeline shifts ... and then execute against it in phases.

Phase 01
Lock the
Architecture
Define system roles (ERP as hub, tax engine as calculator, payment processor as consumer). Map the full transaction lifecycle. Establish explicit constraints: what each system must not do.
Phase 02
Establish
Governance
Centralize NetSuite orchestration under the SI partner. Define scope boundaries for every vendor and internal team. Create "do not proceed until" dependency gates to prevent premature execution.
Phase 03
Build the
Execution Layer
Cross-functional workback plan across eight teams. P0/P1/P2 prioritization to prevent scope paralysis. UAT infrastructure from scratch. Taxonomy built from data. Communications and escalation pathing.
Principle
Decision Quality
Over Speed
The biggest risk was not slowness. It was executing too early against partially locked assumptions. Every structural decision was designed to prevent entire categories of downstream failure.
The Outcome

What the
Integration Produced

8+
Cross-functional
teams aligned
281
Product categories
built from data
70+
UAT test cases
completed pre-launch
13
Weeks to P0
vs 20-24 typical
3
External vendors
governed under one model
1st
Acquisition e-commerce
integration blueprint

The shortest version: I built the first post-acquisition e-commerce integration architecture this organization had ever attempted. It unified eight teams, three vendors, and four systems into a single governed execution path. The site launched. The architecture held. The governance model survived my departure. That last part is the point. Durable systems do not require their architect to remain in the room.

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