David J. Joseph Moved Nucor Mill EDI From Its FTP Server to Files.com—Without Rebuilding the Exchange

The David J. Joseph Company is the leading broker of ferrous scrap in North America and a wholly owned subsidiary of Nucor, which it has supplied with scrap since 1969. Scrap is Nucor's largest single cost, and DJJ is how Nucor owns that supply chain directly: a national network of some 70 recycling facilities, with shredders capable of processing roughly 6.8 million tons of ferrous scrap a year, feeding raw material into Nucor's steel mills.

Alongside the material flows the paperwork. Contracts, shipment records, and invoices move every day between DJJ's systems and the systems at the mills, because every truck of scrap that arrives at a mill has data that has to arrive with it. That exchange runs as files: DJJ's software writes them, the mills' systems collect them and send their own files back, machine to machine, on schedule, across multiple Nucor mill sites. Whatever carries those files is carrying a piece of a steel supply chain.

The FTP Server That Carried It Was a Headache to Own

For years, what carried them was DJJ's own self-hosted FTP server. Running it fell to DJJ's software engineering team, whose actual job is the supply-chain systems on either side of the exchange, not file-transfer infrastructure. Michael Turvey, DJJ's Manager of Software Engineering, is blunt about what that ownership was like.

“We got rid of our internal FTP server because it was a bit of a headache, and then started using Files.com.”

The burden mattered because the exchange behind it is not optional. Without an automated channel, moving contracts and shipment data to the mills means doing it by hand: noticing something has stopped, working out what has and has not been sent, recreating the files, and getting them to the mills so trucks and shipments can be processed. That is the manual reality the channel holds at bay every day.

The obvious modern answer, converting everything to direct API integrations, only went so far. DJJ did convert some mill exchanges to APIs over the years, but as Turvey puts it, for some exchanges that "doesn't always make sense." The scheduled, bidirectional file pattern had to survive. What DJJ needed was a platform that kept that pattern intact: one that spoke the protocols its applications and the mills' systems already used, ran the exchanges automatically, and took the infrastructure itself off DJJ's hands.

DJJ selected Files.com to be that platform, and decommissioned its internal FTP servers.

A Daily File Dump the Mills Collect

The mill exchange now runs on a Files.com site, in the same shape it always had.

“Our system writes the contracts, does a daily file dump up there, and then they'll grab them and bring them into their systems, and vice versa as they receive trucks and shipments.”

DJJ's engineering team built the surrounding machinery in-house on the platform. Files.com Automations and inbound syncs move the files feeding the Nucor mills. DJJ's .NET applications upload directly to folder paths through the Files.com API, preserving the same application-driven drop-and-pickup work the old FTP server used to host. Mills and outside counterparties connect over SFTP, FTP, and FTPS, while the folder structure keeps brokerage, consumer, and Nucor mill flows apart.

No FTP Servers Left, and No Manual Handling

With the exchange in production on Files.com, DJJ replaced infrastructure it had to operate with a platform it builds on.

• DJJ no longer operates any FTP servers of its own for these flows. The system Turvey called a headache is gone entirely, not consolidated or reduced.
• Automation keeps manual file handling out of the mill workflow. Nobody has to reconcile what has and hasn't been sent, recreate files, or deliver them to the mills by hand.
• Adoption spread across the Nucor side of the exchange: a large share of the logins on DJJ's site are Nucor mill accounts, which means the mills themselves work in it daily.
• The platform outgrew its first job. Mills drop operational data into the same site for DJJ's BI reporting, payment and bank files route out through automations DJJ's engineers built, and emailed attachments land in site folders that feed DJJ's Dynamics 365 lockbox process. Each new flow moved onto the platform that already existed, not onto new infrastructure.

Bringing a new counterparty into the exchange stopped being a project, too.

“Once we've added a new user who's trying to exchange some information with a customer, it's been pretty easy to bring them on board and show them how to use it.”

The Exchange Kept Its Shape

Today the daily file dump still runs, the mills still collect their contracts and return their shipment files, and DJJ's applications still write to folder paths, exactly as they did before. What changed is underneath: the infrastructure carrying the file layer of Nucor's scrap supply chain is Files.com's to operate, and DJJ's software engineers spend their time on the supply-chain systems that are actually their job. DJJ never had to force every mill exchange into an API to get there. Retiring a self-hosted FTP server doesn't require converting the work it carried; the file exchange can keep its shape while the server behind it becomes someone else's problem.