Ship Log / Integrations
A Microservice to Automate Handoffs Between Two Departments
When the integration is an email someone has to read and re-type
Problem
Two departments needed the same vendor tasks, tracked in different tools, described in different vocabularies.
The handoff itself was email: someone read a request in one system and typed it into another.
Neither side could see status across the boundary, so both sides chased — and the chasing was the coordination.
Nobody wanted a platform migration to fix a handoff.
Solution
A small service that owns the handoff: it creates the task on the receiving side, carries the identifiers both sides need, and writes status back.
One agreed payload between the departments, so the translation lives in the service rather than in a person's head.
Failures surfaced as work items instead of silence — the failure mode of a quiet integration is the worst one.
Each department kept its own tool; only the seam changed.
Result
The manual re-typing step disappeared, and each side reads status from the tool it already uses.
Cross-department work became visible without consolidating either team onto a new platform.
A pattern worth reusing: automate the seam before proposing a migration.