Khaos Control and InRiver
Integration Agency & Consultants
Product data discrepancies often surface when Khaos Control manages core item master data while InRiver handles enriched marketing content. At scale, keeping these systems in step manually becomes impossible, leading to incorrect pricing or outdated descriptions appearing on sales channels. This integration ensures that rich product data from InRiver is consistently tied to the inventory levels and financial integrity managed in Khaos Control. When these systems drift, customers often encounter inconsistent product information across different channels, which typically leads to increased support volume and fulfilment errors.
Auditing your ERP and PIM stack
We connect your Khaos Control and InRiver integrations quickly, ensuring your ERP and PIM platforms work together effectively. Our consulting services are invaluable, with our system audit providing a thorough review of your tech stack. This enables our consultants and your team to identify and address issues, helping your ERP and PIM systems—like Khaos Control and InRiver—run efficiently. As a result, your technology ecosystem supports smooth operations, allowing you to deliver an excellent customer experience.
Solution Design
We design the Khaos Control and InRiver integration by enforcing strict data ownership. Khaos Control typically acts as the master for core item financial data and inventory, while InRiver masters rich marketing content and variants. A critical design decision is the synchronisation of SKU metadata. We anchor variant definitions and stock availability to the Khaos item master to prevent mismatched pricing or descriptions on digital channels. We prioritise inventory accuracy over real-time content enrichment updates, often choosing to sync rich assets on a defined schedule to protect system performance. This design ensures that high-volume product data does not compromise the stability of core ERP functions. The resulting operating model allows ecommerce teams to manage content through InRiver while operations teams maintain the inventory accuracy required for reliable fulfilment.
Synchronising inventory truth with enriched content
Data flows start with Khaos Control as the source of truth for base SKUs and available stock. This core data is synchronised with InRiver, where teams enrich the records with marketing copy, assets, and channel-specific attributes. The integration ensures that a change in an item record in Khaos Control, such as a stock level update, is reflected in the product data model without overwriting enriched content. We implement monitoring to catch data mismatches before they reach your sales channels, preventing products from being published with missing or outdated information. Finance retains control over the core item master, while marketing handles the consumer-facing detail.
Orchestrating workflows through secure middleware
Leveraging IPaaS with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and above security accreditations, Khaos Control and InRiver integrations are delivered efficiently and securely. IPaaS connects ERP and PIM systems, automating data flow between Khaos Control, InRiver, ERP, and PIM platforms. This approach reduces manual effort, increases reliability, and ensures compliance, making integration between Khaos Control and InRiver robust and future-proof.
Monitoring mapping health and data drift
Standard dashboards often miss the failures that erode data integrity. We prioritise visibility into the mapping between Khaos Control item masters and InRiver product variants. If a SKU is created in the ERP but fails to link correctly in the PIM, the system identifies it before a product appears with missing data on your website. Our approach surfaces these mapping errors early. This prevents the compound effect of hidden data drift, where errors in attribute mapping lead to pricing or tax discrepancies across your sales channels. You see the health of your product data flow in real terms, not just system uptime.
Functional handover for operations and marketing
Handover focuses on the teams running the daily business: ecommerce, operations, and finance. We define what each team owns, from attribute management in InRiver to inventory levels in Khaos Control. Training covers the routine checks required to ensure product data is accurate across channels and how to respond to sync alerts. Your team learns to identify whether a data discrepancy originated in the PIM or the ERP, ensuring exceptions are handled quickly. We provide operational documentation written for the people running the business. This ensures your staff can manage the integration with confidence as product volumes and channel complexity increase.
Post-launch governance and sync exception management
Post-launch, our focus shifts to ongoing operational ownership. We monitor the critical sync points between Khaos Control and InRiver to catch exceptions before they impact your customers. When an issue is detected, such as a failed SKU import or an attribute mapping error, we provide the context needed for a fast resolution. Our support model is designed to handle issues quickly, ensuring that neither your warehouse team nor your marketing team is left guessing which system is at fault. We maintain the integration layer so your internal teams can stay focused on merchandising and order fulfilment.
Common failures
Mismatched product and item identifiers
Operational impact: An order is created using a SKU from InRiver, but it fails processing in Khaos Control because the identifier does not perfectly match the corresponding Stock Code. This breaks the automated order-to-cash workflow, forcing the operations team to manually investigate and amend each failed Sales Order. At scale, this creates a significant dispatch bottleneck and delays revenue recognition.
Prevention / Action: Establish the Khaos Control Stock Code as the single, immutable SKU across InRiver and all sales channels. The integration logic must enforce this as a primary key, with validation checks to prevent enrichment of any product in InRiver where the SKU does not have a corresponding active Stock Code in Khaos Control. Run regular audit reports to catch any identifier drift before it impacts orders.
Incomplete product data syndication
Operational impact: Updates to marketing copy, specifications or attributes in InRiver are not published correctly to all ecommerce endpoints, leading to inconsistent or outdated information being shown to customers. Merchandising teams are forced to spend time manually checking channel data and firefighting inconsistencies, undermining InRiver's role as the central source for product content and causing a poor customer experience.
Prevention / Action: Design the syndication process to handle channel-specific publishing rules and confirmations. Use a queueing system to manage updates, allowing for retries on failure and providing a clear status for each publication job. This ensures that a failure to update one sales channel does not prevent successful updates on others and provides a clear exception report for the ecommerce team to action.
Inventory data latency and overselling
Operational impact: Stock levels from Khaos Control, the inventory master, are not reflected accurately on sales channels because of delays or failures in the sync process through InRiver. This latency leads directly to overselling, which erodes customer trust and creates costly manual work for the customer service and fulfilment teams who must manage cancellations and communications. It can also lead to excessive stock buffers being held to compensate, tying up business capital.
Prevention / Action: Decouple inventory synchronisation from the main product enrichment data flow. Inventory updates should be processed as a frequent, lightweight, and high-priority background task that sends only changed stock levels from Khaos Control. Implement monitoring that alerts the operations team if the last successful stock sync exceeds a defined threshold, preventing stale data from causing widespread overselling.
Inconsistent SKU lifecycle management
Operational impact: A new Stock Code is created in Khaos Control but is not linked and published via InRiver, remaining invisible to sales channels. Conversely, a SKU is discontinued in Khaos Control but not unpublished by InRiver, allowing orders for obsolete items. Both scenarios create exceptions that disrupt the fulfilment process and require manual data reconciliation by the operations and finance teams.
Prevention / Action: Define a clear, state-based process for managing the product lifecycle, from creation to end-of-life, owned by a designated team. The integration logic must ensure a SKU is not published until it is confirmed active in both Khaos Control and InRiver. For retirement, the process should first unpublish the SKU from all sales channels via InRiver before it is archived or deleted in Khaos Control.
Frequently asked questions
Where should we manage product data? In Khaos Control or InRiver?
In this operating model, Khaos Control serves as the master for core financial data and inventory, centred on the 'Item record'. InRiver then acts as the master for all rich marketing content, specifications, and channel-specific attributes that are published to sales platforms. This separation prevents conflicts where marketing copy changes could interfere with auditable stock and financial data.
How does this integration prevent overselling if stock is in Khaos Control but product data is published from InRiver?
The integration establishes Khaos Control as the single source of truth for inventory levels. This stock data is synchronised from Khaos Control's item records and associated with the relevant product in InRiver. InRiver then publishes this available quantity alongside the rich product content to your sales channels, ensuring listings reflect what is actually available to sell.
What happens if a product is created in InRiver without a matching item in Khaos Control?
If an enriched product from InRiver is published to a sales channel without a corresponding 'Stock Item' in Khaos Control, you cannot correctly manage inventory or process sales orders for it. This typically causes order synchronisation to fail, as Khaos Control will reject any 'Sales Order' that contains a SKU it does not recognise. New products must typically be initiated in Khaos Control to create the master SKU first.
If we archive a product in InRiver, does it get removed from sale automatically?
Not without specific logic. Retracting enrichment or deleting a product in InRiver does not inherently trigger an 'unpublish' action on your sales channels or archive the corresponding 'Item record' in Khaos Control. This can lead to 'ghost' SKUs remaining available for sale long after they have been discontinued, causing order failures. The integration must be configured to manage this product end-of-life process across all three systems.