Step 01
Upload a file and look at it
Export what you have — from a spreadsheet, or from whatever your current system produces —
and upload it. Cargovate reads the column headings and proposes a mapping: it recognises
the names real exports use, including the ones SAP emits, so a file usually arrives
mostly mapped rather than blank.
You then see a preview of exactly what would be created and what would be changed, before
a single record is written. Rows that cannot be imported are listed with the reason, in
the language of your file rather than ours — a missing customer name, not a constraint
violation.
Step 02
Let the same export arrive on its own
Once a mapping is agreed, save it. Your system produces its nightly export as it already
does; that file lands in a folder, and Cargovate picks it up unattended.
This is deliberately the least demanding integration we can offer. It needs no API access
to your system, no service account, no firewall change, and no approval from whoever owns
your ERP — because it is a scheduled report, which every ERP team already produces by the
dozen.
Step 03
Run both systems for as long as you need
Re-sending the same rows updates them rather than duplicating them. That single property
is what makes parallel running practical: the same file can arrive twice, a backup can be
replayed, and a nervous first month can be repeated nightly without the record degrading.
Your existing system stays the system of record for as long as you want it to be. We do
not write back into it — see Integration for why that is a
deliberate limit rather than a missing feature.
Honesty
You will be told what changed
Two systems holding the same shipment will eventually disagree — someone corrects a date
in one and not the other. When an import overwrites a value that had been edited in
Cargovate, that is listed field by field: what it was, what it became, and on which
record.
Most platforms report "142 updated" and leave you to discover the rest. The count tells
you the import ran; it does not tell you that a delivery date your team fixed on Tuesday
was quietly reverted on Wednesday.
Limits
What we do not claim
A direct connector into SAP, Oracle or Manhattan is not something we ship as a
tick-box. Every one of those systems is configured beyond recognition by the time it has
been in service a few years, and a connector written against the vendor's documentation
rather than against your instance is a demonstration, not an integration.
Where a customer needs one, we build it against their system, with their payloads, as
defined work. Until then the scheduled export does the job — and in most evaluations it
keeps doing the job for long enough that the connector never becomes urgent.
