A Material Handling Manufacturer Moved Its Entire Partner Network Off On-Premise SFTP Onto One Files.com Gateway

A material handling equipment manufacturer builds forklifts for the North American market. Its equipment reaches customers through hundreds of dealers and support centers, and its supply chain trades with some of the largest retail and logistics operations on the continent.

A business built on a dealer network runs on files. Dealers send invoices. Trading partners exchange orders and EDI documents. All of it has to cross from hundreds of external organizations into the manufacturer's backend, where SAP is the ERP backbone and Azure is the cloud platform. For a manufacturer structured this way, partner file exchange is not a side task of IT. It is the connective tissue of the business. The challenge was to replace its self-managed SFTP model with one repeatable pattern for browser, SFTP, and eventually AS2 traffic, with every file feeding Azure and SAP.

More Than a Hundred Partner Accounts on Servers the Manufacturer Ran Itself

The manufacturer served that exchange from on-premise SFTP servers its own team had to stand up and support. More than a hundred external accounts, covering dealers and trading partners uploading invoices and B2B files, ran on infrastructure that was the manufacturer's to build, patch, and keep online. The environment was doing its job. The cost was in the trajectory: every new B2B requirement meant more on-premise infrastructure, at a company whose corporate strategy pointed toward SaaS. As integration requirements grew, the path forward was standing up and supporting yet another SFTP server. Even ad hoc needs ran into the same wall, with a business user blocked from sending a document too large for email.

The partner population made a replacement harder than a lift-and-shift. Some partners automate their uploads over SFTP. Others can only use a browser. Whichever way a file arrived, it had to be archived into Azure Blob Storage and handed to the SAP middleware for processing. And with the network growing, the manufacturer's enterprise integration architect did not want to hand-build a workflow for every single trading partner. The replacement had to be a SaaS platform that could carry the full partner population, give every partner a path that matched their capability, and serve the whole network through one repeatable pattern.

The manufacturer selected Files.com as that platform.

One Mailbox per Partner, One Pipeline Behind All of Them

The manufacturer rolled Files.com out in phases, starting small against a live partner base rather than forcing a coordinated cutover. Each dealer and trading partner got its own mailbox and directory on the site. Technically capable partners connect over SFTP, automated or manual. Everyone else uploads through a browser under the manufacturer's own branded domain, and internal users sign in through Azure AD single sign-on.

What happens after upload is the same regardless of how the file arrived, and that sameness is the design. Files.com Automations move each partner file into a central pickup location, while Remote Server Sync archives it in Azure Blob Storage. SAP Integration Suite and Azure integration services then collect the files over SFTP and webhooks for downstream processing. GPG decryption handles encrypted third-party uploads within the same flow.

When Trading Partners Required AS2, the Gateway Was Already Running

As the network grew, trading partners that mandate EDI over AS2 came into scope, including some of the largest retail and logistics companies on the continent. The answer was not a new server. The manufacturer turned on AS2 on the same Files.com site and configured partner connectivity inside the platform. Trading-partner EDI now flows through the same governed gateway as dealer invoices, with no AS2 appliance for anyone at the manufacturer to size or patch. A requirement that once would have meant another infrastructure project became configuration on the platform already carrying the dealer network.

Integration-Hub Load at Scale, and No New SFTP Servers to Build

With Files.com in production, the manufacturer moved the bulk of its self-supported SFTP estate to a single SaaS gateway for its trading network. The results run at the scale of the business:

• The bulk of the on-premise SFTP estate is retired, and new partner connections no longer require the manufacturer to stand up or capacity-plan another server.
• Files.com carries genuine integration-hub load, with outbound connections mostly to SFTP and Azure endpoints.
• Every inbound partner file is archived to Azure Blob Storage before it leaves processing, enforced by the pipeline rather than by anyone remembering to copy it.

The reusable pattern also broadens who can do the work. A database administrator who previously ran file movement through Azure storage accounts set up a Files.com automation unaided.

Integration Work Instead of Server Work

Since moving to Files.com, the manufacturer's integration team designs data flows rather than running file servers. The manufacturer did not move its partner connections one bespoke workflow at a time. It built one per-partner pattern on Files.com and let the whole trading network run through it.