An Engine Parts Supplier Brings Retailer AS2 In-House, Ending Week-Long Vendor Builds

An engine parts supplier manufactures, imports, and distributes internal engine parts for professional engine rebuilders, from distribution centers across the United States. Those parts reach the market two ways. They go directly to the rebuilder shops the company has always served, and they go through large retail and e-commerce channels that sell aftermarket parts at national scale.

The second path is where the file transfer lives, and it comes with a rule: a large channel partner does not adapt to its supplier's systems. Orders arrive as EDI documents, and the partner decides the protocol they arrive on. The supplier runs that exchange on Files.com. Each trading partner has its own account and folder structure, orders come in over SFTP and FTP, and a Files.com Agent installed on the company's on-prem ERP server pulls them into the Prelude ERP on a scheduled sync for processing. Files.com’s built-in AS2 support would let the supplier replace a week-plus, ERP-vendor-controlled build with an in-house configuration task, without adding another server.

A Retail Partner Required AS2, and the Only Path Ran Through the ERP Vendor

When the supplier brought on a large automotive-parts retailer as an EDI trading partner, the retailer required AS2, the signed and receipted protocol large retailers mandate for EDI. The supplier had never run AS2. The only established way to get it was to have the ERP vendor build the connection on the ERP server, and the vendor quoted a week or longer to create a single connection. The supplier wanted the connection live on its own schedule.

That put a new sales channel behind an outside build. And it would happen again: every future partner that mandated AS2 would mean the same request and the same wait.

The arrangement was deliberate. The Prelude ERP, running on UniData on an on-premises server, is the supplier's system of record for orders, inventory, and invoicing, and the company relies on the vendor for its support and customization. Changes to that server go through the vendor. The alternative was the standard one: source a dedicated AS2 product, license it, and operate it. For an internal IT team, that meant standing up and patching a separate system to answer a single protocol requirement.

What the supplier needed was AS2 under its own control: its own AS2 identity, certificates it exchanged with partners itself, and inbound orders landing on the same route into the ERP that every SFTP partner already used, with no new server behind any of it. It turned out the supplier already owned exactly that. AS2 is built into Files.com, the platform already carrying its partner order traffic.

Its Own AS2 Identity, on the Same Route to the ERP

Using the AS2 support built into Files.com, the supplier stood up its own AS2 identity and exchanged certificates with the retailer directly, managing them in the Files.com interface. The retailer's connection was configured on a single call, with the partner and the supplier's external ERP consultant on the line. The first live inbound AS2 message arrived, and testing of 850 purchase orders followed right behind it.

In production, X12 850 orders arrive from the retailer over AS2, and 810 invoices and acknowledgements go back out the same way. Past the protocol, nothing about the traffic is special. AS2 files land in the partner's folder on Files.com, the same automations that route SFTP orders route them, and the Agent on the ERP server delivers them on the same scheduled sync. The ERP processes the orders and tickets print in the warehouse for the pickers, exactly as they do for every other partner.

From a Week-Long Vendor Build to an In-House Configuration Task

With its own AS2 endpoint live on Files.com, the supplier replaced a per-connection vendor project with a configuration task its own team runs.

• Onboarding the next AS2 partner is now an in-house task, not a request to the ERP vendor. The supplier has since added further AS2 trading partners itself, with no vendor build and no week of waiting.
• Partners can now choose the protocol: one existing trading partner has moved off another EDI transport and onto AS2 with the supplier.
• There is no AS2 server in the estate. No separate product was sourced or licensed to answer the mandate, and there is nothing new for the IT team to patch. Files.com is the endpoint.

When the Next Partner Names Its Protocol

Today, an AS2 requirement lands on the supplier's own desk. The exchange that used to open with a request to the ERP vendor and a week or more of waiting now opens with a certificate swap on Files.com, and the new partner's orders join the same route into the ERP as everyone else's. For a supplier whose largest channels set the terms of the exchange, that is the change that matters: the protocol a partner mandates is no longer a project the supplier has to buy. It is work the company's own IT team does itself, on the platform that was already moving the orders.