The Elite Group Routes Flower Orders to Warehouse Robots Through Files.com

The Elite Group grows and distributes cut flowers through an integrated supply chain that extends from its international grow facilities to automated warehouse fulfilment for major retail buyers.

Flowers are perishable, and demand spikes hard by season. A supply chain like that only works if the distance between an order and a box on a truck stays short, so the group has invested heavily in automation and logistics engineering. In its distribution warehouses, a Mecalux warehouse automation system processes incoming orders and physically arranges the boxes headed out to retail buyers.

That system runs on files.

A Warehouse That Runs on Files

Mecalux exchanges its transactional data as files. Orders, invoices and inventory data move in and out of the system over FTP, and the warehouse robots downstream consume those order files to organise and route boxes for outgoing shipments. On the other side sits Traze, the group’s ERP, where the orders originate. For the automation to do its work, files have to move dependably between the two systems — and the requirement that first brought the group to Files.com was exactly this: an FTP service to exchange files with an external party’s system.

This is not people sharing documents. Both endpoints are machines, and the traffic is constant and transactional. The consumer at the far end is a physical robot inside the fulfilment path, so an order file that fails to arrive is an order the robot cannot pick and a shipment that does not leave.

The exchange point had to speak FTP natively to the automation platform, carry API traffic from the business systems, serve multiple warehouse locations, and stay continuously available. That is infrastructure someone has to host, secure, patch, and keep online for as long as the warehouses run.

The Elite Group selected Files.com to be that exchange point, without having to build and operate FTP infrastructure of its own.

One Exchange Point Between Traze and Mecalux

Files.com sits between the Traze ERP and the Mecalux warehouse system as the transfer point for the group’s fulfilment data. Order, invoice and inventory files land on Files.com over FTP and SFTP, the protocols the automation platform natively speaks, while the Files.com REST API carries the production integration traffic on the business side. Downstream, the warehouse robots pick up those files and use them to process and route orders for distribution.

People reach the platform under the same governance as the machines: staff sign in through the group’s Azure single sign-on, so file access follows the corporate identity rather than a separate set of logins.

56,000 API Calls a Day Inside the Fulfilment Path

With the flow in production, the exchange between The Elite Group’s business systems and its warehouse automation runs as machine-to-machine traffic on Files.com, with no person in the loop between an order leaving the ERP and a robot acting on it.

Production integration traffic runs to roughly 56,000 API calls a day, making Files.com working plumbing inside daily operations rather than a tool people occasionally open. The files it delivers are the same files the robots use to arrange boxes for outgoing shipments, placing the exchange directly inside the physical fulfilment path.

Multiple warehouse locations feed the same flow, so one exchange point serves multiple sites rather than transfer infrastructure standing at each one.

The Pattern the Warehouses Run On

When a retail buyer’s order leaves The Elite Group’s ERP, nobody carries it to the warehouse. It lands on Files.com, and a robot takes it from there. That is a different job than file transfer usually gets credit for: not staff exchanging documents, but the link that turns an order in a business system into a box on a truck.