The Challenge
What TopGum Was Facing
TopGum connects suppliers and buyers in a B2B supply chain network where orders, inventory, and fulfilment flow between systems that use different integration standards — EDI 850/856/810, REST APIs, and flat-file FTP feeds. Building a platform that could speak all three, maintain accurate multi-warehouse inventory in real time, and process high-volume order events without data loss required careful API and integration architecture.
The Solution
What We Built
We designed the integration layer as an API gateway that translated between EDI, REST, and flat-file formats, normalising all transactions into an internal canonical order event model. Order events were published to a Kafka topic, consumed by inventory, fulfilment, and invoicing services independently. Multi-warehouse inventory used a reservation pattern — available stock was atomically reserved on order placement and released on cancellation — implemented with Redis distributed locks to prevent overselling. The public API was versioned from day one using URL versioning and maintained backwards compatibility across all consumer integrations.
Results