HubSpot + WorkWise ERP integration

WorkWise is an ERP for manufacturers that design what they sell: industrial vehicles, agricultural and industrial equipment, food and beverage equipment, metal and plastic fabrication, and electronics. Aptean announced its acquisition of WorkWise, LLC in 2020 and now sells the product as Aptean Industrial Manufacturing ERP, WorkWise Edition. The old workwisellc.com address forwards to Aptean’s industrial manufacturing page.

The product’s selling point was the join between ERP, CRM and CAD. The quote carries configured products and estimates, the order carries the engineering, and a CRM sits inside the suite with a portal that shows reps open orders, invoices, quotes and receivables. The WorkWise datasheet calls it OnContact CRM, and Aptean’s feature pages call it Aptean CRM. Teams that move sales and marketing to HubSpot lose that portal, and with it the view of what their accounts have ordered and still owe.

The quote is where HubSpot matters most. In engineer-to-order work the quote is the pipeline: it goes through revisions, gets priced against the configuration, and is won or lost. A HubSpot pipeline that cannot see WorkWise quotes forecasts from what reps remembered to type, while estimating works from something else entirely. The whole brief is a schedule sales can trust for quotes, orders and invoices landing in HubSpot.

Five objects. Customers become HubSpot companies, quotations become deals, customer orders update the deals their quotes opened, invoices attach to a custom object on their order, and standard items become products.

Quotes and orders share one deal on purpose. WorkWise converts a quote to a customer order without rekeying, so a naive sync would open a second deal at conversion and the forecast would count the same work twice. Discovery confirms that each order keeps the number of the quote it came from, and the sync upserts on that number, so a won quote simply moves forward.

Everything moves one way. The customer, the price and the order remain WorkWise records, and HubSpot displays them without editing them. Keys are WorkWise numbers held in custom HubSpot properties, never names.

Configured products need a rule. The WorkWise product configurator assembles a product from features and options for each customer order, so those lines do not belong in the product library. Standard items become products, and a configured line reaches HubSpot as a summary on the deal.

We start with files because the Web API’s reference is not public. Aptean, or whoever administers your WorkWise, schedules an extract for customers, quotes, orders and invoices, each with a count file, delivered to an SFTP location we run.

The loader fingerprints every file so the same extract never loads twice, holds back any row that breaks the agreed layout, and writes the rest to HubSpot in batches keyed on the customer, quote and invoice numbers. Associations run as a second step, and the count file is the check: what WorkWise exported against what HubSpot now holds.

The Web API is the upgrade path. The WorkWise eCommerce gateway already moves customers, orders, pricing and shipping details between WorkWise and a web store as JSON over ASP.NET Web API. With its reference and a service account, the same service reads the API on a polling interval instead of waiting for files, and nothing downstream changes.

What decides the route is what Aptean will share. A scheduled export needs only a job and a file drop, and it works whether WorkWise runs in the cloud or on your own servers. The Web API gives fresher data and a path to write back later, and it depends on Aptean providing the reference.

An iPaaS has nothing to call until that reference exists, so it would only move files and charge per task on every quote revision. Nothing in the marketplace is named for WorkWise, and the Commercient app named for Aptean Industrial Manufacturing is worth one question to its developer, not a plan. Either build route keeps the same keys and the same HubSpot objects, so starting with files costs nothing later.

1. Scope. We confirm where WorkWise runs, what Aptean CRM keeps doing, and whether Aptean will share the Web API reference or schedule an export.
2. Architect. The keys, the quote to order rule, the blanket order mapping and the extract layout are agreed and written down before any code.
3. Build. The loader is built on sample WorkWise extracts in a HubSpot sandbox, and it only writes to portals on its allowlist.
4. Validate. We reconcile open quotes and orders against WorkWise reports and walk the differences with estimating and sales.
5. Operate. Every run is checked against its count file, failed runs can be replayed, and the loader moves to the Web API once Aptean hands over the reference.