As businesses grow, their systems must evolve to keep pace. The company at the heart of this project had built its foundation on a legacy marketing system that managed contracts, inventory, and logistics across multiple locations. The company operates in the agricultural sector, processing and distributing a wide range of products across various markets. With a strong presence in both B2B and B2C sectors, they handle complex production lines, manage vast amounts of inventory, and engage in sophisticated logistics to meet high demand from global retailers and food service providers.
Despite its industry leadership and a strong operational foundation, the company’s marketing system, built on outdated technologies, had become a bottleneck. Over time, instead of enabling smooth operations, it slowed down processes, introduced inefficiencies, and left no room for automation. The system was originally designed to handle core business functions, but its rigid infrastructure couldn’t scale or adapt to the company’s growing needs.
Why modernization was necessary
At first glance, the system still worked — it processed contracts, tracked shipments, and stored customer data. But underneath, its limitations were growing:
- No structured transaction records – Auditing was nearly impossible, making errors hard to trace.
- Flat, unstructured data – Reporting was unreliable, and even basic analytics required excessive manual effort.
- Contracts tied to single plants – Employees had to manage workarounds to track multi-plant operations.
- Manual EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) – Order processing slowed down due to labor-intensive data handling.
- No API-ready infrastructure – The system couldn’t integrate with modern analytics, forecasting tools, or a future customer portal.
These inefficiencies weren’t just an operational headache — they actively limited the company’s ability to optimize workflows, improve customer experiences, and scale with demand.
Re-architecting for a future-ready system
We proposed multiple options, from incremental optimizations to a full system rebuild. The client chose a balanced strategy that restructured the system architecture while optimizing business functionality.
This meant solving issues at both the technical and operational levels:
- Re-architecting the system – Migrating from a monolithic structure to microservices for greater flexibility and independent scaling.
- Data integrity & automation – Implementing a fully transactional system to ensure consistent, auditable records across contracts, inventory, and orders.
- Seamless integrations – Designing an API-first architecture to enable automation, real-time data access, and future system extensions.
Now, let’s explore the specific improvements made to the marketing system’s business logic and user experience. Then, we’ll see how the microservices architecture serves as the foundation for these enhancements, enabling scalability, automation, and seamless integration.
Modernizing for better automation
Here’s how we transformed a rigid, outdated system into an efficient, accurate, and scalable platform.
1. Ensuring data integrity with a transactional system
Errors happen. But without a record of what changed, who changed it, and when, tracking down mistakes is impossible. That’s what employees faced every day—contract updates, order adjustments, and inventory corrections disappeared without a trace.
We eliminated this data black hole by implementing a fully transactional system:
✔ Every system action is logged – No more guesswork when investigating discrepancies.
✔ Before-and-after values are recorded – Every change has a traceable history.
✔ Audit logs ensure compliance – Employees can troubleshoot with confidence.
Now, audits take seconds instead of hours, and critical data is never lost.
2. Structuring data for real insights
Before, data existed in silos—customer accounts, contracts, and inventory were disconnected. This lack of structure made reporting unreliable and analytics a nightmare.
We introduced multi-level hierarchies to reflect real-world business relationships:
🔹 Customer accounts now follow parent-child structures, simplifying reporting.
🔹 Inventory is tracked through lots, sublots, and super-lots, improving accuracy.
🔹 Contracts and orders span multiple plants, eliminating fragmented tracking.
With these improvements, reports generate instantly, contracts and shipments are linked, and forecasting is precise.
3. Eliminating manual errors with data standardization
In the old system, free-text fields for customer names, contract IDs, and shipment dates led to data chaos. Employees entered information inconsistently, causing duplicate records, missing shipments, and unreliable reporting.
To fix this, we enforced strict validation and structured data entry:
✔ Dropdown selections replaced free-text fields, ensuring consistency.
✔ Automated validation flagged missing or incorrect shipment dates before they caused issues.
✔ Duplicate detection rules cleaned up records, improving accuracy.
Now, data entry is structured, eliminating costly mistakes and making reports 100% reliable.
4. Unifying contracts and inventory across plants
Managing multiple facilities shouldn’t feel like juggling separate businesses. But the old system locked contracts, inventory, and orders into isolated silos.
If a customer needed supply from multiple locations, employees had to create separate contracts and manually track balances. Checking inventory across plants required constant back-and-forth, and planning was unreliable.
We solved this by introducing cross-plant contract and inventory management:
🔹 A single contract can now support multiple plants, eliminating duplicate entries.
🔹 Automated balance tracking ensures real-time contract fulfillment.
🔹 Enterprise-wide inventory visibility allows teams to check stock instantly.
Now, operations flow seamlessly, and employees can focus on strategy instead of fighting system limitations.
5. Automating data exchange
Processing thousands of transactions manually wasn’t sustainable. Each customer integration required custom configurations, slowing down order fulfillment and increasing errors.
We modernized the EDI system, ensuring:
✔ Automated transaction processing, reducing manual intervention.
✔ Support for multiple formats (X12, API-based exchanges, FTP).
✔ Real-time data synchronization, eliminating delays and errors.
Now, orders, shipments, and invoices flow without bottlenecks, improving efficiency at scale.
6. Preparing for a seamless customer portal
Today’s customers expect instant access to order statuses, invoices, and shipment tracking. But the old system had no self-service portal—every request required manual processing, leading to delays and frustration.
Instead of patching together a temporary fix, we designed an API-driven system that enables:
✔ Secure external access – A future customer portal can integrate without system overhauls.
✔ Real-time order and shipment visibility – No more back-and-forth emails.
✔ Seamless analytics dashboard integration, giving both customers and employees clear insights.
This ensures that when the business is ready to launch a portal, the system is already built to support it.
7. Turning guesswork into data-driven forecasting
Without demand forecasting, production planning was a guessing game. Every plant operated in isolation, leading to inefficient inventory management, shortages, and last-minute adjustments.
We implemented predictive analytics and automated planning:
🔹 Aggregated demand models analyze historical trends to predict future needs.
🔹 Automated material planning prevents overstocking and shortages.
🔹 Live inventory synchronization ensures accurate stock availability.
Now, planning is data-driven, reducing waste and improving resource allocation.
8. Bringing precision to pricing calculations
Pricing wasn’t just complicated—it was error-prone. Every adjustment for product concentration, container type, or transportation costs required manual calculations, increasing the risk of inconsistencies.
We automated pricing workflows to eliminate inefficiencies:
✔ A structured pricing model dynamically adjusts for contract terms and transport costs.
✔ Automated validation ensures pricing accuracy before contracts are finalized.
✔ A centralized pricing database gives finance teams full visibility.
Now, pricing is transparent, accurate, and instantly adjustable.
Microservices-based architecture for enterprise apps
The original system, built on Oracle Forms and Reports, was too restrictive for today’s fast-moving business needs. Upgrades were complex, integrations were painful, and scaling was nearly impossible.
We replaced this outdated structure with a microservices-based architecture designed for efficiency, automation, and long-term adaptability:
- Backend: Developed in .NET, using RabbitMQ as the event hub for asynchronous, decoupled service communication.
- Frontend: Built with React.js, providing a fast, intuitive, and responsive user interface.
- Database: Migrated from Oracle to Microsoft SQL Server, improving performance, cost-efficiency, and flexibility.
- Deployment: Adopted Docker-based containerization, ensuring consistent environments, automated CI/CD workflows, and scalable deployments.
- The API Service acts as the system’s main entry point, securely handling data requests and processing user actions via HTTPS.
- The Identity Service, integrated with Microsoft Entra ID and Active Directory, manages authentication, ensuring secure access across internal and external users.
- The Notifications Service provides real-time updates via WebSockets, improving operational awareness and response times.
- The Docs Service generates and processes documents automatically, storing them in SharePoint for seamless file management.
- The EDI Service enables secure, standardized B2B communication, supporting X12-based exchanges via FTP and API-based integrations.
- The Transactions Service captures every system action, ensuring data integrity, transparency, and full audit trails.
Instead of a monolithic system prone to bottlenecks, the new architecture ensures that each service operates independently, allowing the platform to evolve without disrupting the entire system. This event-driven architecture eliminates delays, making data flow real-time, reliable, and scalable.
✅ The key outcomes:
✔ Manual workarounds eliminated through real-time automation.
✔ Data integrity strengthened with structured, transactional records.
✔ Multi-plant operations streamlined by unifying contracts and inventory.
✔ Order processing accelerated via automated EDI workflows.
✔ System future-proofed with an API-first architecture, ready for seamless integrations.
If you’re facing similar challenges, let’s discuss how we can future-proof your enterprise together.
