Mondou Used Files.com Logs to Retire Core FTP Scripts and Cut API Calls by More Than 90%

Mondou is a Canadian specialty retailer of pet food and supplies. Its group IT team supports the Mondou and Ren’s Pets banners across the company’s Canadian footprint and the systems used by 2,500 employees.

Retail at that scale is a file business. Inventory and order data moves constantly between the ERP, the e-commerce platforms, and the workforce systems, and those integrations were built up over years. Some were built by outside consultants. One of the most important of them, the file exchange feeding the ERP, was a consultant’s work, and nobody inside the company could say what it actually did. Files.com logs eventually showed that the process was handling the same file almost always 48 times. Hugo Côté, who runs system administration and security for the group, used that evidence to retire the Core FTP scripts, rebuild the integration in-house, and reduce daily API volume by more than 90%.

The Integration Only an Outside Consultant Understood

The files themselves moved through Mondou’s Files.com site. The process moving them lived outside it: the Core FTP client, driven by PowerShell scripts, fired by Windows Task Scheduler, all assembled by a consultant. It polled folders on a schedule, picked up files, and pushed them along. To Mondou, it was a black box.

That black box sat on the company’s core ERP data flow. Because nobody in-house had built the process, nobody in-house could safely change it.

The one place the process could not hide was the platform it ran against. Mondou’s Files.com account was recording far more API calls than the company’s real file traffic could explain. Hugo decided the exchange had to become something Mondou owned: observable per account and per operation, and built on a pattern the company had already proven.

The Same File, Processed 48 Times

Files.com logs every operation on a site: which account acted, what it did, on which file, and when. Hugo filtered that record down to the integration’s service accounts and read the root cause straight out of it. Each file generated four API calls (one GET, two POSTs, and one PATCH), and the same file was going through that cycle almost always 48 times. That is 192 API calls to move a single file, multiplied across every file the exchange handled, every day.

He had the failure named, measured, and attributed to specific accounts and folders, without needing the consultant to explain anything.

Rebuilt on a Pattern That Already Ran Clean

Rather than repair the scripts, Hugo retired them. He had already built a clean exchange between Files.com and the company’s workforce platform: a dedicated service account for the integration, access confined to its own folder, and the application driving file movement directly through the Files.com REST API. That exchange had never shown the redundant behavior, so it became the model.

He rebuilt the ERP exchange the same way. Core FTP, the PowerShell layer, and the Task Scheduler jobs came out. The application now talks to Files.com itself under a service account that can reach only the folders that belong to it. Then he used the same logs that had exposed the problem to prove the fix held.

Daily API Calls Fell by More Than 90%

With the rebuilt exchange in production, Mondou replaced an unowned script process with an integration it can read end to end.

• Daily API volume fell by more than 90%, and subsequent review confirmed the application changes were permanent.
• The ERP exchange is owned in-house. Mondou can read it, change it, and verify it without going back to the consultant who built the original.
• “Is this integration working correctly?” is now a lookup. The logs show which account performed which operation on which folder, so any claim about an integration’s behavior can be checked against the record.
• The pattern compounds. A scoped service account, its own folder, and direct API calls is now how Mondou’s ERP, e-commerce, and workforce platforms exchange files.

The Exchange Layer Mondou Now Builds On

Today, Files.com sits between the systems that run the business. Mondou’s ERP, e-commerce, and workforce platforms trade files through the site under scoped service accounts, and the Files.com on-premise Agent carries files down to the Windows servers where the company’s e-commerce processing runs. Asked why Mondou keeps building on Files.com rather than assembling the same capabilities itself on raw cloud infrastructure, Hugo points to the complexity of recreating its features on AWS:

“Files.com has more features, especially with the SIEM, so I know that AWS is going to be more complicated to have that.”

A question about a misbehaving integration used to mean asking the consultant who built it and hoping the answer matched reality. Now it is a query Mondou’s own team runs against the logs. The company never fixed the scripts. It removed the layer that made them unreadable, and the exchange pattern built in their place is the one it reaches for every time two of its systems need to trade files.