Legacy Supply Planning to Serverless Microservices
ASP.NET monolith to open cloud-native services for a sustainable-packaging leader — eight years, continuity, and 24/7 ops support
The Challenge
The client operates one of the largest sustainable-packaging and supply-chain services networks in North America, delivering reusable plastic containers, pallets, and pooling services to grocery retailers, food producers, and consumer-goods manufacturers. Its logistics and manufacturing planning system was the operational backbone for fulfilment planning, freight optimization, load planning, shipment creation, and accounts-payable charge management.
The legacy implementation, built on ASP.NET, had served the business for years — but accumulated technical debt, scaling limitations, and tight coupling to specific deployment infrastructure were increasingly constraining the company’s ability to grow and integrate with modern partner systems. The client needed a transition path that delivered modern cloud-native capabilities (open architecture, microservices, serverless flexibility, third-party API integration) without disrupting an active operational supply chain. Truck loads needed to be planned, shipments needed to ship, and customers needed to be invoiced — every day, throughout the modernization.
The Solution
Applied Decision Technologies led an eight-year, $1.2M sustained engagement to architect, develop, and operate the modernization. The legacy ASP.NET application was incrementally redesigned as a microservices-based open serverless cloud architecture. New service boundaries were drawn around clear functional domains — fulfilment planning, freight optimization, shipment creation, load planning, accounts-payable charge processing, AR/pricing, accounting integration. Services were rebuilt for cloud-native deployment with seamless integration into the broader technology landscape — including bidirectional integration with carrier systems, accounting systems, and partner platforms via documented data-interchange policies.
The firm provided complete project management, process analysis, software development, implementation, and post-implementation support across geographically dispersed teams. Operational support was structured for the realities of supply-chain delivery: 24/7 emergency-response coverage, with explicit response-time targets within one hour for emergency calls (missing data, system down, missed coordination among separate software systems, user support); urgent work response within 24 hours for issues affecting shipping and order management; and surge capability — providing a +10% level-of-effort increase with less than five days lead time when the business demanded it. Multiple contracting teams were managed in parallel.
Throughout, ADecTec coordinated multiple geographically dispersed teams under a single integrated delivery model, ensuring that operational continuity was preserved while modernization progressed.
Outcomes
The client’s logistics and manufacturing planning capability transitioned from a constrained legacy ASP.NET stack to a modern, cloud-hosted, microservices-based open serverless architecture — delivered on time, within the agreed $1.2M budget, and with no operational disruption to the active supply chain.
The modernized platform integrates seamlessly with carrier and accounting systems via documented interfaces, scales with the business through cloud-native elasticity, and supports the operational disciplines (24/7 monitoring, emergency response, surge capability) that a sustainable-packaging supply chain requires.
The eight-year duration of the engagement — and the depth of mutual trust it represents — is itself an outcome: ADecTec was retained as the firm’s primary engineering and modernization partner across multiple workstreams, business cycles, and organizational changes throughout that period.
Why It Matters
Sustained, multi-year modernization engagements look easy in retrospect but are unforgiving in execution. They require disciplined project management, deep domain understanding, technical depth across legacy and modern stacks, and operational reliability that holds up under daily business pressure.
This engagement is a complete case of all four. For any enterprise client contemplating a major legacy modernization that cannot be completed in a single big-bang release — and where 24/7 operational continuity is required throughout — ADecTec brings a verified, multi-year track record of delivering exactly that.