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Issue 031TeardownIntegrationsRef 094

Customer master data across CRM, ERP and commerce: the merge rules nobody writes down

Customer master data management across CRM, ERP, and commerce platforms is often assumed, rarely documented, and frequently problematic. This teardown examines the common pitfalls and decision points for B2B merchants.

Neil Boughton· Technical Director
5 min readReviewed January 2025
"The problem with customer master data cross-system merge rules is not that they are wrong, but that they are usually unwritten."
Written by
Neil Boughton, Technical Director at iWeb
Neil Boughton
Technical Director
29 years at iWeb

Neil leads platform architecture and integration strategy at iWeb. He has designed ERP and commerce integration patterns across manufacturing, wholesale and retail, and writes about operational resilience, release governance, observability, and the infrastructure decisions that determine whether large programmes stay stable under pressure. Bias toward durable, measurable systems over architectural theatre.

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