GoAnywhere MFT’s Flexibility Helps PMFresh Pivot to Better Serve Customers and Partners
PMFresh uses GoAnywhere MFT to handle its 20,000 weekly file transfers. They initially chose GoAnywhere as a solution to replace problematic custom-written and legacy programs to meet the requirements of their large customer, Domino’s Pizza. The robust solution has since proven itself with its flexibility, functionality, and ease of use both in and out of the organization.
“GoAnywhere’s flexibility in being able to interact with the varied systems of our customers, allows us to effectively set up electronic trading partnerships with our customers,” noted Ashish Bhatt, IT Manager for PMFresh. “GoAnywhere is a flexible, secure file transfer tool that makes file transfers and other business processes easier.”
“With four manufacturing plants and a small IT staff, GoAnywhere can straddle all the systems easily without specialized skill sets. By using more variable skill sets it’s been easier to manage file sending, receiving, and translating. GoAnywhere allows us to do more with less,” Bhatt added.
Bringing Secure File Transfer In-House Brought Reliability and Cost Savings
Prior to installing GoAnywhere, PMFresh used a mixture of solutions, including a third-party provider, but experienced a lot of issues. “We were under a lot of pressure to bring the Domino’s ordering system and B2B communications inhouse to reduce the manual management needed for these processes. There were a lot of moving parts,” Bhatt said.
“Every time we wanted to interact with an external trading partner, we had to find a solution they were able to manage. When we started to work with Domino’s, we found our old process gave us lots of errors and our third party charged us considerably to receive those transfers,” noted Bhatt.
Simon Kuenstner, a tech consultant working with PMFresh, was tasked with finding a solution for PMFresh’s in-house system. “We were very satisfied with the options GoAnywhere MFT provided another customer in terms of reliability, logging, and encryption,” Kuenstner noted. “Once installed, GoAnywhere has more than proven its flexibility and high reliability over the years. It is secure, very fast, and the scalability is great. It doesn’t matter what platform you need to connect to, it can easily communicate with whatever you or your partners have.”
What used to take hours or even several days now can be accomplished in minutes or hours. And the Advanced Workflow engine gives PMFresh the ability to do everything from simple transfers to complex automation. Bhatt also appreciates the logging and ability to integrate messaging and alerts into the file transfer process.
“With GoAnywhere, we were able to get the set-up with Domino’s started over a weekend, had the ordering process automated on an FTP site, and that project is still running smoothly today,” added Kuenstner.
GoAnywhere MFT: Mission-Critical Solution for PMFresh
GoAnywhere is considered mission-critical for PMFresh and is now incorporated into all parts of the business from accounts, purchasing, production, and customer service. PMFresh has been able to reduce many of the manual tasks for processing electronic orders, invoices, business intelligence reporting, and more. “Without GoAnywhere receiving, moving, and translating files, the business would stop,” said Bhatt. “We are able to both reduce the hours needed for processes and save money. And with multiple systems, many trading partners in the industry, and a complex, distributed factory footprint, GoAnywhere allows us to be more flexible. It is the glue that connects our systems.
“We continually look at our processes to see if GoAnywhere can help in any way. Our people – both in and out of the organization – are very happy with what we have done so far, as it has saved them so much time. It’s a fast, productive environment, is stable, and integrates with all our systems,” Bhatt added.
On-Premises Results Transferred Successfully to Azure Cloud
In 2020, when increasing their cloud footprint, PMFresh, migrated all their on-premises and data center computer workloads to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Part of that migration included moving their six-year instance of GoAnywhere to Azure.
With GoAnywhere implemented in Azure, PMFresh now hosts SFTP and AS2, (server and client) in the Cloud, to securely communicate with their external trading partners. They also run integrations between services hosted in Azure and on-premises, as well as their ERP systems which are also hosted.
PMFresh utilizes virtual machines (VM) in Azure for their GoAnywhere instances and utilizes GoAnywhere’s Gateway within an Azure DMZ for optimal security with internet facing trading partners and systems. In addition, utilizing the Azure Cloud’s highly available architecture, backup options, and the ability to replicate the GoAnywhere environment into other regions, gives us infrastructure reliability that PMFresh did not have in their on-premises data center. It allows PMFresh to serve their customers with reliable orders, invoices, and communications. “I’d highly recommend running GoAnywhere in the cloud if it is a critical component of your business, like it is for PMFresh,” Bhatt said.
GoAnywhere MFT Helps PMFresh Deliver Service Excellence to Customers
According to Bhatt, with GoAnywhere in place, PMFresh can process new orders in a timelier fashion and communicate more reliably with their partners. “The simplicity of the software allows us to onboard new customers and suppliers easily, saving us both a lot of time,” Bhatt noted. “The streamlined processes help partners as well. Some of our larger customers have large processing sites, and GoAnywhere allows us to align with their existing processes.
“The solution’s flexibility gives us an advantage. We can say, ‘we can work with that’ and that flexibility has helped us a lot,” he added. While already utilizing many functions of GoAnywhere, SFTP, HTTPS, AS2, and GoAnywhere Gateway, Bhatt anticipates adding process automation using Secure Forms. “We have plans to migrate some additional dated processes on old systems to GoAnywhere as well. We want to continue exploring its capabilities as it saves us time and money, and most importantly for our customers, it is highly reliable.” Bhatt added, that by using the Advanced Workflow engine, “Our only limitation is our imagination.”