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Case study

Legacy ERP integration with Twilio SMS

Diagram of an ERP publishing SMS jobs to a worker queue
Business context

Multi-company business group · UK-wide. SMS required from an ERP with no native messaging APIs.

Application age / version

Long-established ERP. Direct API calls from the ERP were not feasible (performance, reliability, architecture).

Starting condition

Need for outbound and inbound SMS across brands, without putting Twilio latency on an ERP request cycle.

Main technical risks

Blocking ERP workflows. Lost inbound replies. Shared sender IDs across companies. Webhooks that trust unsigned payloads. No delivery audit.

Audit findings

Decouple: ERP publishes jobs; a worker talks to Twilio; inbound webhooks write back. The same queue-and-webhook shape used in Laravel support work.

Work completed

Node.js worker queue. ERP publishes outbound SMS jobs. Twilio delivers. Inbound replies via webhooks, parsed and written back to the ERP. Two-way correlation. Separate sender IDs and templates per company. Centralised logging and delivery status.

Deployment / migration

Worker scaled independently of the ERP. SMS never blocked core ERP processes.

Integrations

Twilio SMS (outbound + inbound webhooks). Legacy ERP job/outbox. Multi-company identity.

Testing added

Webhook ingestion treated as untrusted input. Message correlation so replies land on the right company and conversation.

Result

Reliable high-volume SMS from a legacy ERP. Replies visible inside the ERP. No performance impact on core operations. One integration serving multiple businesses. Extensible to future channels. Communication modernised without replacing the ERP.

Ongoing support

Queue-based; suitable for ongoing operational use.

Facts as published on HTML Studio case studies. Expert involved: Oliver Burton. Stacks are named as built — not recast as Laravel.

Why this sits on a Laravel practice site

This was Node.js, not Laravel. The architecture is the one Laravel queues exist for: do not call a third party inside the request, verify webhooks, make handlers idempotent. See API development and support.

Full write-up: Twilio SMS ERP integration.