FHI Runs a Grocery Partner's Fixed Delivery Schedule From Stable Addresses With a Files.com Agent

FHI pioneered the professional unloading industry. Founded in 1991, the company supplies trained crews that load and unload trucks inside grocery and retail distribution centers across the United States, working in facilities that range from 200,000 to 1.5 million square feet. Its teams operate deep inside other companies' buildings, on other companies' schedules.

That position shapes how FHI moves data. The load and appointment files that tell its crews what freight is coming, and when, flow between FHI and the distribution customers it serves. Those customers set the terms of the exchange: the endpoint, the format, and the schedule. FHI adapts to each one.

For one major grocery distribution customer, that adaptation had hardened into a fixture. Files were delivered to the customer's FTP server three times a day, seven days a week, at the same times since at least 2015. The customer's endpoint accepts connections only from addresses on its allowlist, so any delivery path FHI chose had to send from addresses that never change.

A Delivery That Had to Keep Its Clock and Its Address

The process behind that delivery was homegrown, and it had run for nine years. FHI's systems team wanted it on a managed file transfer platform instead, with the platform doing the staging, the scheduling, and the cleanup, and the systems behind FHI's firewall doing nothing more than producing the files. And the move had to leave the customer's side of the exchange exactly as it was.

Fixed Addresses, Fixed Times

The replacement had two hard constraints.

First, the schedule had become an operational promise. The customer had received files at those times since 2015 and expected them at those times, every day. Any replacement had to keep the customer-facing behavior identical: same endpoint, same files, same clock.

Second, the source address had to be one the customer's allowlist accepts. FHI's Azure transfer path sends from randomized outbound addresses, so that route could not carry this feed. The source data, meanwhile, is produced by systems behind FHI's firewall.

The replacement had to pick files up from behind that firewall, present connectivity the customer could whitelist, hit three fixed delivery times a day without drift, and clean up the source afterward. It had to do all of that without the customer changing a single thing on their side. FHI selected Files.com to be that delivery layer.

A Local Share, an Agent, and a Scheduled Push

FHI's systems administrators built the new pipeline. A script extracted the CSV and TXT files and dropped them into an outbox folder on a local file share. That was the last step the source systems took.

From there, the Files.com Agent synced the outbox folder to Files.com on a fixed interval, staging the files ahead of each delivery window. The Agent connected outbound only, so nothing behind FHI's firewall had to accept an inbound connection and no firewall change was needed.

A Files.com Automation then pushed the staged files through a Remote Server connection to the customer's FTP endpoint on the same fixed schedule, deleting them from the source after each completed transfer. The delivery comes from stable addresses the customer's allowlist accepts, which is the requirement the randomized Azure egress could not meet.

From One Feed to a Repeatable Operating Model

With the pipeline in production, FHI replaced a homegrown push with a governed, scheduled delivery running on Files.com. The source systems only produce the files, the customer's allowlist requirement is met, and the long-established delivery schedule continues unchanged.

The pattern did not stop at one feed. Files.com Agents now run across FHI's on-prem file servers, carrying scheduled syncs around the clock. Standing up the next scheduled exchange means configuring another sync and another Automation, not building another homegrown process on another server.

Changing the Plumbing Without Changing the Promise

FHI built its business on stepping into other companies' operations without disrupting them. With Files.com, it applied the same discipline to its own infrastructure. The grocery distribution customer continues to receive its load and appointment files at the expected times. Behind that unchanged schedule, everything is different: the systems administrator now has a delivery that stages itself, pushes on schedule, and cleans up after itself. A nine-year-old partner delivery never had to change for the partner in order to change completely behind it.