NFI Industries
NFI relies on EDI and integrations to run operations and communicate with partners. Without integration, boxes don’t ship, and trucks don’t move. Business halts.
Business goals
In 2017, NFI, a top 30 third-party logistics provider, was processing 15 million transactions monthly and managing over 800 integrations with 300 trading partners. As rapid growth strained its digital infrastructure, NFI aimed to improve transaction reliability, reduce integration development time and costs, control licensing expenses, and accelerate innovation. The company also had service-level agreements with major clients, and failing to meet these obligations would have negatively impacted its bottom line.
Integration Challenges
Before adopting Boomi, NFI used IBM Sterling Integrator, which caused significant technology challenges. Frequent database connectivity issues led to system downtime, failure diagnostics were slow, and integration development took 40 hours per transaction. Scaling required costly licenses, and excessive database consumption limited live data storage to three days. The system could only run 52 concurrent processes, causing delays and bottlenecks. These issues made NFI’s infrastructure complex, leading to staffing challenges and the need to re-architect its operations.
How Boomi Helped
NFI’s Senior Director of Application Services, Rodney Lucas, led the team in adopting Boomi after evaluating multiple iPaaS vendors. Boomi excelled by offering fast, high-volume data processing, reducing integration development time, and minimizing data errors with canonical data validation. It also simplified API integration and integrated seamlessly with NFI’s monitoring system. Additionally, Boomi’s support for a canonical data format made it easier to move customers between Warehouse and Transportation Management Systems, further streamlining NFI’s operations.
Results
The Boomi platform brought stability and resilience to NFI, eliminating system-wide outages and handling increased transaction volumes. Key results included reducing integration build time from 40 to 12-16 hours, cutting support tickets from 400 to 36 per month, and removing the need for overnight issue management, improving work/life balance. Enhanced system reliability led to higher customer satisfaction, particularly with major clients, while significant cost savings were achieved. Overall, Boomi’s scalable integration technology improved operational efficiency and employee satisfaction.
