Challenge
StrawFish sells foodservice products into national distributors. A significant portion of that volume moves through EDI, where partners send purchase orders electronically and expect an answer back in minutes: order confirmed, here's the ship notice, here's the invoice.
As the business grew and expanded into new areas, StrawFish needed a platform that could increase operational throughput across every channel. Order volume was rising, trading partner requirements were tightening, and the company needed a system that could keep pace. Off-the-shelf ERPs were on the table, but the catch with buying is that you end up renting the thing your whole business runs on. You pay per seat forever. You get the roadmap the vendor picked. And when that vendor raises prices or won't support an integration you need, it's your problem, not theirs.
The harder problem wasn't picking software. It was that no vendor had sat with the C-suite to understand where the business was headed, seen the physical products and how pallets are stacked at headquarters, or traced the workflow from case picking to label download to ASN. StrawFish needed a platform built around how they actually operate, and the gap between what was available and what they actually needed could only be closed by someone who learned the operation from the inside.
Strategy
StrawFish decided to build. MajorLinkx deployed the technical arm.
Jarue Johnson, an L-4 Staff Engineer at MajorLinkx, was embedded at StrawFish as a forward-deployed engineer. At MajorLinkx, a forward-deployed engineer is a post, not a title. Every engineer here is full-stack, and the hiring bar is set so that anyone on the team can step into a client's operation and own the outcome end to end: taking acceptance criteria from stakeholders, mapping out a product roadmap, running cost analysis, architecting systems, writing the code, and communicating across every level of the business. The scope of the engagement determines who gets deployed. A full platform buildout like this one is a staff-level assignment. Integrating AI into an existing workflow might be handled by an L-2. The skill set is the same; the complexity is what scales.
For StrawFish, that meant Jarue learned the business from the inside: working with the C-suite and core stakeholders to understand the company's trajectory, visiting headquarters in Boca Raton to see the physical products, watching how pallets are stacked to inform what became one of the platform's core features, and tracing the warehouse workflow end to end, from how cases are picked to when a label is downloaded to when the ASN needs to be sent. The goal was not to take a requirements document and disappear. The goal was to become the person who understood both the operation and the technology well enough to make the right calls in real time.
From that position, Jarue owned the full product lifecycle. He coordinated integrations with the EDI trading partner, the carrier API, and the accounting software. He handled the technical requirements and the product requirements together, calling out edge cases stakeholders hadn't considered: what happens when a PO is resent, how to handle duplicates, what the failure path looks like when a carrier API goes down. These are the questions that surface when the person building the system is close enough to the operation to ask them. The platform's EDI layer was architected to integrate with any trading partner or EDI network, not locked to a single provider, so StrawFish has the technical arm to onboard new partners on their own terms.
A custom ERP built from the ground up is typically a two-and-a-half-year undertaking. Using agentic development, we compressed that timeline to eight months. Two of those months were not development at all. They were compliance and onboarding: getting certified with EDI compliance bodies, meeting the requirements of trading partners in the food distribution industry, onboarding to the EDI network, and navigating the regulatory checkpoints that come with enterprise distribution. One of those compliance milestones had a ten-day deadline; we cleared it three days ahead of schedule. The actual development window was roughly six months for a platform that takes an EDI order, checks stock, plans the pallets, generates the carrier label, sends the ship notice, and drops the invoice into the accounting system. Most orders never need anyone to touch them, so the team spends its time on exceptions and on selling.
This is how MajorLinkx operates. A forward-deployed engineer learns the business, understands the outcomes stakeholders need to achieve, and builds a technical roadmap that shows how to get there and for how much. It is the difference between a vendor who builds what you described and a partner who builds what you actually need.
Automation
- Inventory allocation : checks stock across locations and reserves units so the platform never oversells
- Pallet calculation : plans cases into full-truckload pallets with fill-rate optimization and manual override
- Acknowledgment and labeling : confirms the order, generates the carrier label, and queues the ship notice
- Stock replenishment : syncs on-hand inventory after orders ship and flags below-reorder positions
Integrations
EDI Trading Partner · bidirectional. Every exchange stored with its raw payload and validation result.
Carrier API · outbound. Rating, labels, cancellation, and third-party billing per partner account.
Accounting Software · bidirectional. Invoices out; customer details, contacts, and notes both ways.
Transactional Email · outbound. Templated PDFs and operational alerts from a dedicated service.
Observability · telemetry. Error tracking, per-service logs, and alarms on load, latency, and connections.
Architecture
Containerized services behind a shared load balancer, split across two client applications and one shared data layer. Every tier runs in the client's own cloud account.
Tech Stack
Outcome
The platform processes orders end to end without anyone opening the app. After a successful advance ship notice, the invoice follows in approximately 70 milliseconds platform-side. The architecture is built for the volume the business is growing into, and integrating a new EDI partner is a configuration change, not a development project.
What matters more than speed is leverage. When a vendor quotes them a number, they can say no. If an integration costs more than it's worth, they skip it, or they build it themselves. When a partner wants something unusual, that's a few weeks of work instead of a support ticket and a spot in someone else's backlog. A company running on a rented platform doesn't get to make any of those calls.
The platform was also built for what comes next, not just what was needed today. The architecture supports AI integration across the ERP without a rewrite. A CRM layer is ready for StrawFish to connect to whatever CRM they choose while keeping all of their proprietary data in their own infrastructure. The next user costs nothing to add. The next trading partner is a row in a settings screen. And the platform keeps getting more valuable to them specifically, because it's shaped around how they actually do business instead of how a vendor assumed they would.
None of this happens without a forward-deployed engineer embedded in the operation. The industry is moving in this direction: companies like Anthropic, Palantir, and Google are deploying engineers directly into businesses to solve problems alongside stakeholders. MajorLinkx has operated this way from the start. Jarue Johnson spent eight months inside StrawFish's operation, closed over 450 requests, and delivered a platform the company owns outright. The code, the data, the infrastructure, and the roadmap belong to StrawFish. We built it. They own it.