Problem: 3-person team spent 4 hours daily exporting from SAP to Salesforce via CSV/Excel. Formula errors caused incorrect quotes ~2 per week. Inventory data was 24 hours stale in Salesforce.
Solution: SAP change data capture (IDoc real-time output) published inventory and order changes to Kafka. A custom connector service applied field mapping and business rules, then called Salesforce Bulk API in batches of 500 every 10 minutes. Failed records written to a dead-letter table with human-readable error descriptions and hourly Slack summaries.
Technology: SAP IDoc · Kafka · Salesforce Bulk API · Node.js
Optimisation pattern: csv-excel-export-to-event-driven-integration
Outcomes:
Reconciliation team: 3 FTE → 0. Staleness: 24 hours → 12 minutes. Incorrect quotes: zero. Transformation errors: zero.