Enginetech Brings Summit Racing AS2 In-House, Ending Week-Long Vendor Builds

Enginetech has supplied professional engine rebuilders since 1982. From its Dallas–Fort Worth headquarters and distribution centers across the United States, the company manufactures, imports, and distributes more than 15,000 internal engine parts SKUs, a line it calls the most extensive in the market. 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. Enginetech 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 15-minute sync for processing. Files.com’s built-in AS2 support would let Enginetech replace a week-plus, ERP-vendor-controlled build with an in-house configuration task, without adding another server.

Summit Racing Required AS2, and the Only Path Ran Through the ERP Vendor

When Enginetech brought on Summit Racing as an EDI trading partner, Summit required AS2, the signed and receipted protocol large retailers mandate for EDI. Enginetech 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. Even then, the vendor pushed back on taking the work.

That left a new sales channel sitting behind an outside company's queue, waiting on work that outside company did not want. And it would happen again: every future partner that mandated AS2 would mean the same request, the same wait, and the same pushback.

The arrangement had survived because it was deliberate. The Prelude ERP, running on UniData on an on-prem Linux server, is Enginetech's system of record for orders, inventory, and invoicing, and the company relies on the vendor for its support and customization. Anything built on that server is built by the vendor and owned by the vendor. The alternative was the standard one: source a dedicated AS2 product, license it, and operate it. For an internal IT team of two, that meant standing up and patching a separate system to answer a single protocol requirement.

What Enginetech 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 Enginetech already owned exactly that. AS2 is built into Files.com, the platform already carrying its partner order traffic.

“Oh my God, we already have this. So sweet, I don't have to source that again.”

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

Using the AS2 support built into Files.com, Enginetech stood up its own AS2 identity and exchanged certificates with Summit Racing directly, managing them in the Files.com interface. The Summit connection was configured on a single call, with the partner and Enginetech's external ERP consultant on the line. The first live inbound AS2 message arrived in November 2024, and testing of 850 purchase orders followed right behind it.

In production, X12 850 orders arrive from Summit 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 15-minute 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, Enginetech 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. Enginetech 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 Enginetech.
• 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 two-person IT team to patch. Files.com is the endpoint.

When the Next Partner Names Its Protocol

Today, an AS2 requirement lands on Enginetech's own desk. The exchange that used to open with a request to the ERP vendor, a week or more of waiting, and pushback at the end of it 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 Enginetech has to buy. It is work Joe Shultz's team does itself, on the platform that was already moving the orders.