Radwell Replaces Exit Ball With Files.com for Its 100-Vendor Exchange

Radwell International keeps industrial plants running by supplying new and surplus industrial automation, electrical, electronic, pneumatic, and hydraulic parts, along with repair and MRO services for manufacturers and plant operators.

A catalogue that broad is only as current as the vendor data behind it. Price and inventory files flow between Radwell and a network of roughly 100 vendors, some weekly, some monthly, in both directions. That exchange is the plumbing under the distribution business, and it had outgrown the way it was built. Radwell needed one repeatable exchange that could accommodate vendors’ existing technology rather than require them to modernize first.

Exit Ball Outbound, a Hand Upload Inbound

The outbound half of the exchange ran on Exit Ball, a legacy system built to distribute price files to vendors. The inbound side included manual handling wherever an automated path did not exist. One vendor generated an Excel file every day and uploaded it by hand because its upload tooling was a Visual Basic console application pinned to .NET Framework 4.8. When the vendor’s developers looked at moving to Framework 5.0, they found the upgrade meant rewriting 15,000 lines of working code. The application stayed where it was, and the upload stayed manual.

That vendor made the constraint visible. A feed that depends on someone remembering to upload it arrives when that person does, while a bespoke integration creates its own work on Radwell’s side.

The hard part of a vendor exchange is not the distributor’s side. It is the hundred counterparties, each with its own systems, developers, and appetite for change. Radwell did not control its vendors’ stacks and could not assume they would modernize to fit its platform choice. A working 15,000-line application was never going to be rewritten to suit Radwell’s platform choice.

So the replacement had a specification. Radwell needed one exchange point it operated itself, in place of Exit Ball plus manual handling around it. It had to give each vendor credentialed access and its own drop point, speak the protocols vendors already had, and offer a scriptable path for vendors that automate. Radwell selected Files.com to be that exchange layer.

A Login, a Folder, and a Protocol per Vendor

Roughly 100 credentialed vendor logins now stand behind the program, each delivering into its own dedicated folder.

Vendors connect however suits them. Some upload over SFTP with the clients they already have. Others script the exchange against the Files.com .NET SDK, authenticating with API keys issued for the job. On Radwell’s side, Files.com webhooks and Automations turn an arriving vendor file into an event Radwell’s systems can react to, instead of a file waiting to be found.

The vendor with the daily hand-upload showed the approach. Files.com support worked directly with that vendor’s developer to get the .NET SDK running inside the existing Framework 4.8 application. The 15,000-line rewrite never happened. Automation could proceed on the toolchain the vendor already ran, which was the only toolchain it was ever going to run.

The Next Vendor Is Provisioning, Not a Project

With the vendor feed program in production, Radwell replaced Exit Ball and the manual handling around it with one repeatable exchange.

• Price and inventory files move in both directions through one Files.com site Radwell administers, instead of keeping outbound distribution on Exit Ball and the daily upload outside it.
• Onboarding another vendor is provisioning a login and assigning a folder. The pattern already exists, so the exchange grows with the network instead of with manual effort.
• Vendors automate on whatever they already run. One began moving a daily hand-upload toward a scripted upload without rewriting 15,000 lines of code.
• Every feed lands under its own credential in its own folder, so vendors stay separated by design rather than by care.

Taking Every Vendor Exactly as It Is

Files.com gave Radwell a single exchange it operates itself, and with it a vendor network that could be automated one counterparty at a time, without any vendor having to modernize first.