“Boomi is a rock. Its stability and processing speed have never let us down. To this day, we haven’t run into a single time where Boomi caused us to have an outage. It just keeps running.” -Rodney Lucas, Senior Director of Application Services, NFI Industries.
Business goals
In 2017, NFI, one of the country’s top 30 largest third-party logistics (3PL) providers, was receiving, shipping, warehousing, and transporting products at a dizzying rate, processing 15 million transactions per month. The company maintained relationships with more than 300 trading partners, which required the smooth functioning of over 800 unique integrations. As the company’s digital infrastructure faltered under the strain of rapid growth, NFI wanted to:
- Improve transaction reliability
- Reduce the time and resources required for integration development
- Control the licensing cost of scaling operations
- Accelerate the pace of innovation
Moreover, the company had service level agreements (SLAs) with its customers, some of whom were among the economy’s largest companies. Failing to meet the provisions of those agreements would have a direct, negative effect on the bottom line.
Technology challenges
NFI initially used IBM Sterling B2B Integrator, known as the platform of choice in the 3PL industry. But the company constantly experienced problems, including:
- Frequent database connectivity issues caused system downtime
- Diagnosing failures required a deep dive into logs, delaying resolution
- Integration development took around 40 hours per transaction
- Scaling up involved more costly licenses
- Excessive database consumption allowed for only three days of live data storage
Additionally, the system could run only 52 concurrent processes, causing delays and processing bottlenecks as one client’s volume significantly impacted another. All these deficiencies meant NFI’s infrastructure and workarounds were extremely complex, which led to staffing challenges. The company had no choice but to re-architect its operations to address these pain points.
How Boomi helped
NFI’s Senior Director of Application Services, Rodney Lucas, and his team first implemented microservices and message queuing to reduce data loss and impact on the integration platform. Then the company thoroughly evaluated several prominent integration platform as a service (iPaaS) vendors. Boomi came out on top. The Boomi Enterprise Platform offered:
- Fast data processing at extremely high volumes
- Reduced integration development time
- Fewer data errors with support for a canonical data validation format that also simplified API integration
Boomi also integrates with NFI’s end-to-end monitoring system that feeds the dashboards used by the client services and operations teams. Further, the company’s canonical data format made it easy to move customers from one Warehouse Management System (WMS) or Transportation Management System (TMS) to another, further streamlining operations.
Results & business outcomes
The Boomi platform proved to be extremely stable and highly resilient, handling increased transaction volumes while making system-wide outages a thing of the past. In addition, there were other significant results:
- Integration build time decreased from 40 hours to just 12-to-16 hours
- Operations-generated support tickets dropped from 400 per month to only 36
- System reliability eliminated the need for overnight issue management, improving work/life balance while making time for innovation
- Faster issue response and integration stability enhanced customer satisfaction, especially with large, high-profile clients
- Substantial cost savings were realized through reduced spending on necessary functionalities
NFI’s successful migration to the Boomi platform delivered the advantages of robust, scalable, and modern integration technology, making a positive impact on operational efficiency and employee satisfaction.
After switching to Boomi, the quality of life for our team has improved drastically. We get to sleep through the night!” – Matt O’Brien, Manager of Integration Development, NFI Industries, & Kevin Strong, Integration Solutions Architect, NFI Industries
Conclusion
NFI’s journey with Boomi exemplifies how the right integration platform can transform complex logistics operations into streamlined, scalable, and resilient systems. By replacing outdated infrastructure with Boomi’s modern iPaaS solution, NFI not only overcame critical operational challenges but also achieved remarkable improvements in efficiency, reliability, and cost control. Most importantly, this shift empowered their teams to focus on innovation and customer service, reinforcing NFI’s position as a leader in the 3PL industry. As their experience shows, choosing a stable, future-ready platform like Boomi isn’t just a technical upgrade; it’s a strategic advantage.
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