Before you start

None of this is required to open a workspace. It is what makes the first week productive rather than exploratory.

Have ready

• Administrator access to whichever system your orders arrive in. Almost every connection needs somebody who can authorise an application against the account.
• The name of one repeated job, written in two sentences.
• A sense of what that job costs when it goes wrong, because that is what sets the first spending ceiling.
• One person who will read the approval queue. Not a rota — one person, at first.
• An email address that reaches someone, on the account you register providers with. Approval decisions go there.
• Your stock sheet, wherever it lives, and an honest answer about whether it is current.
• The last four exceptions you handled by hand. These become the first agent's test cases.
• Half an hour, twice, in the first week — one to set up, one to read traces.

Decide first

Which single system to connect

Not all of them. Wherever your orders actually arrive. Structured sources before mail, always.

What the agent must never do

Two or three things, decided before it runs rather than after it surprises you. This is the sentence most briefs are missing and the one that most changes behaviour.