The People and paper technique is often overlooked in discussions of system integration. The integration of the majority of systems at most manufacturing companies is accomplished with people using paper, meetings, and manual data entry and re-entry. This is a slow, error prone, and expensive process, but reflects the reality that resources to build automated integrations are limited. File transfer techniques automate the extraction, storage, and loading of data via files. This greatly reduces errors, and yet keeps the generation and utilisation systems isolated from each other.
Isolation allows changes to or replacement of one of the systems without affecting the other.
File transfer generators and loaders are usually started manually or by timer based batch jobs. File based information transfers are not real time, and therefore both systems have copies of the transferred data that need to be kept synchronised. File transfer connectivity is relatively easy for organisations in the People and Paper connectivity generation to understand and accept. It usually involves minimal changes to business processes, just the automation of the data entry and transfer steps. The change from people and paper to file transfer connectivity is often justified as a cost reduction.