Our client’s core business functions were distributed across independent systems for practice management, financial accounting, access management and collaboration. Client and engagement data existed in different forms across systems, requiring manual reconciliation and duplicate data entry. Employee onboarding involved repetitive, error-prone processes across multiple platforms and service delivery workflows relied heavily on human coordination rather than systematic orchestration, increasing risk and administrative overhead. Most critically, leadership lacked access to reliable, cross-functional business intelligence because underlying data was siloed and un-normalised.

Buckham & Duffy was engaged as the lead delivery partner to design and deliver a custom middleware integration platform.

A purpose-built middleware layer was designed using Laravel as the orchestration framework. Secure, resilient API connectors were developed for each upstream system, including:

• 01Practice management (APS)
• 02Financial accounting (Xero)
• 03Identity and access management (Azure Active Directory)
• 04Collaboration services (Microsoft Teams, Outlook, SharePoint)

A unified data model was designed to consistently align data from platforms with different structures, identifiers and update frequencies. The unified data model enabled reliable, cross-functional reporting for the first time. Consolidated data was made available through structured queries and internal services, supporting real-time dashboards for staff utilisation, client profitability and financial performance.