A Food Processor Replaced File Servers at Dozens of Plants With Files.com—Now New Sites Don’t Need Them

A North American food processor packages canned and frozen vegetables and fruit products under its own and licensed brands and for private label. Thousands of employees work across dozens of plants, plus a corporate office.

That footprint keeps growing. Recent acquisitions brought additional brands into the company’s operation and added another plant. Around the plants sits a web of outside parties, including brokers, carriers, equipment vendors, and data providers working with the company on the way to market.

The work crosses all of those boundaries. Corporate exchanges large files with every plant. Departments span multiple sites. Outside partners need files too. For years, the infrastructure underneath that exchange was built the opposite way: a file server at each plant.

A File Server at Every Plant

Each plant ran its own on-premises file server. That meant dozens of everything: hardware to maintain, storage to manage, and access to administer, multiplied across every site.

The deeper cost was structural. The work was organized by function, while the infrastructure was organized by geography. Moving a large file between corporate and a plant meant working against that plant’s server. A department’s files lived wherever they happened to be produced. And there was no single place to bring an outside partner into, because the estate was dozens of separate boundaries rather than one.

The model also scaled linearly: every added plant meant another local server for as long as the site ran.

What replaced it had to serve corporate and every plant from one place, carry the large files that moved between them, organize content by department across the whole company instead of by site, and give outside partners access without standing anything up at a plant. It also had to let the company add sites as users and folders rather than new file-server infrastructure. The company selected Files.com to be that platform.

One Platform, Organized by Department Instead of by Plant

The company consolidated the exchange onto a single hosted Files.com platform and built the folder structure along business lines. Sales, marketing, operations, and engineering each work from their own folder tree, so a department’s files live in one place no matter which plant or office produced them. Corporate and plant users share the same folders, and a large file bound for a plant travels through the platform instead of against that site’s local server.

For outside parties, the company issues Files.com guest logins. Brokers, carriers, equipment vendors, and data providers each get access scoped to the folders they need. A partner reaches exactly the content meant for them, and nothing at any plant is involved in making that happen.

The Plants Run Without File Servers

With Files.com serving the whole footprint, the company retired the per-plant file servers. The hardware, storage, and site-by-site administration that came with dozens of local servers went with them. Access for internal teams and outside partners is now administered in one place rather than at dozens of separate sites.

And the infrastructure no longer scales with the footprint. Under the old model, every new plant meant another server to buy, stand up, and administer. On Files.com, a new site means new users and new folders on a platform that already exists. For a company that has recently added another plant through acquisition, that is the difference between growth that adds infrastructure and growth that adds accounts.

Adding a Plant No Longer Means Adding a Server

Today, the company’s file exchange is no longer coupled to its real estate. It still runs dozens of plants. The file server that used to sit at every one of them is gone.