An Engine Parts Distributor Adds a Files.com Store-and-Forward Layer in Front of Its Prelude UniData ERP

A US aftermarket engine parts distributor supplies professional engine rebuilders. It manufactures, imports, and distributes internal engine parts: pistons, gaskets, bearings, timing sets, camshafts, and complete engine kits. Its parts reach the trade two ways. Independent rebuilder shops order directly, and national retail chains and e-commerce marketplaces carry the brand and transmit their orders electronically.

That second channel is where the volume comes from, and every order in it arrives as a file. Those files feed the distributor's system of record: a Prelude ERP built on UniData, running on-premises and supported through its vendor. The ERP processes each order and prints pick tickets in the warehouse, where pickers pull the parts and ship them.

Between the trading partners on one side and the ERP on the other, the distributor's entire order flow is file transfer. It supports distribution centers across the United States.

Order Files From Retail Partners to the ERP

The distributor wanted one point that every order file passes through on its way from a trading partner to the ERP, where the file can be found again if the ERP fails to process it. An order file is a pick ticket and a shipment, so the channel that carries it has to be able to replay it.

The files moved through a HostedFTP.com site. Trading partners delivered order files there, and on the on-premises server, a custom retrieval script for each partner polled the site every 15 to 20 minutes, pulled down whatever had arrived, and handed it to the ERP. The site received files and held them until a script came for them, and that was the whole of what it did. It had no sync capability, no automation, and no way to keep a copy of anything, so every improvement had to be scripted around it on the server, adding to the pile of per-partner scripts the IT team maintained. Each new trading partner meant another script to write.

The ERP Stays Exactly As It Is

The ERP is the system of record for orders, inventory, and invoicing, and the distributor depends on its vendor for support and customization. Whatever changed the order pipeline had to leave the ERP itself untouched. Every live partner feed pointed at the old hostname, so the change had to be staged rather than switched.

That set the requirements. The replacement had to speak the protocols the partners already used, including AS2 for the retailers that required it. It had to keep a recoverable copy of every order file and hold inbound transmissions when the on-premises server was down. It had to reach the ERP's server without exposing it, and without any change to the ERP itself. And it had to come live one partner at a time, with the old site still running underneath.

The distributor selected Files.com to be that layer.

Files.com Between Every Trading Partner and the ERP

Files.com became the store-and-forward hub for the distributor's order traffic: the one point every file passes through on its way between a trading partner and the ERP, with the ERP unchanged behind it.

On the intake side, each trading partner has its own account and folder at the distributor's own domain, with folder-level permissions that keep every partner inside its own space. Retail chains and marketplaces connect over SFTP, FTP, or AS2. Partners install nothing and see nothing beyond their own folder.

On the ERP side, a Files.com Agent runs inside the distributor's network and connects outbound only, so nothing on-premises is exposed to the internet. Files.com syncs push each arriving order file into the folder the ERP's scheduler already polls on its existing cadence. The per-partner retrieval scripts were retired, and the ERP kept its existing jobs, repointed at the new source. That repointing was the entire backend change, a couple of hours of configuration by the distributor's external ERP consultant.

Recoverability comes from a Files.com Automation. The moment an order file is created, the automation copies it into a safety-copy folder, and a second Agent carries that stream down to the Veeam backup VM. Retention on the safety-copy folder expires each file after a set period, long enough to catch and re-run anything that failed, and the archive cleans itself up with no one touching it. Three copies of every order file now exist from the moment it arrives: the live Files.com folder, the ERP server, and the backup.

The outage protection required no configuration at all. If the on-premises server is unreachable, inbound files simply hold on Files.com, and when the Agent reconnects, the sync delivers everything that accumulated.

A Month in Parallel, One Partner at a Time

The distributor synced the old site's contents into Files.com over a remote server connection, recreated the active partner accounts with SFTP credentials and folder permissions, and then ran both platforms live in parallel for roughly a month while every workflow was validated. Partners cut over one at a time, beginning with a major reseller, with a few days of monitoring between each, and the ERP ran dual jobs against both sources until the last feed moved. No partner feed dropped during the cutover.

Every Order File Has a Safety Copy

With Files.com in production, the distributor's order channel keeps three copies of every file it carries and holds traffic through outages.

• A failed or mis-processed order is found and re-run, not reconstructed. The file itself is retrievable from the safety copy for a set period.
• An on-premises outage holds transmissions instead of interrupting them. Inbound files wait on Files.com and deliver themselves when the server returns.
• Every partner feed came across the migration intact, and files have arrived and routed as expected since, with safety copies landing as configured.

The compounding result is what each new partner costs. Bringing on another trading partner used to mean writing and maintaining another retrieval script. Now it is an account, a folder, and a credential over SFTP, FTP, or AS2, and the safety-copy automation and ERP sync apply from the first file. The pattern that fixed the existing feeds is the pattern every future feed rides.

Resilience Without a Modernization Project

Today, Files.com is the distributor's customer-facing order channel. The accounts on the site belong overwhelmingly to trading partners and customers rather than staff, because the platform is where the business meets the companies that buy from it.

The distributor got all of it without touching its system of record. The UniData ERP still runs the same scheduled jobs against the same folder it always polled. The system of record did not have to change for its order pipeline to become resilient. Files.com built the resilience around it.