Rebuilding a decade-old operational platform
Recovering and rebuilding a decade-old inventory platform the warehouse still depends on—after reverse-engineering workflows and business rules that were never fully documented. Engagement status: Active.
The situation
A decade-old ColdFusion inventory platform with little or no usable documentation, a fragile/inaccessible data layer, and critical system knowledge concentrated in one person. The warehouse and inventory operation still ran through that system every day.
Why it was hard
- The business still depended on the system day to day—change could not assume a quiet cutover window.
- The data layer was difficult to access, raising migration and continuity risk.
- Institutional knowledge was not written down; behavior lived in code and in people's heads.
- A decade of operational evolution meant processes existed around the system as well as inside it.
What had to be understood
- Actual workflows and business rules recovered through reverse-engineering before significant change.
- Architecture, data relationships, workflows, and operational logic captured in Groundwork documentation maintained with the engagement.
- Where undocumented behavior and informal processes had become load-bearing for the operation.
The decision / approach
Rebuild on a modern stack after recovering how the operation and current system actually worked—migrating the data the business depends on without stopping the warehouse. Rewrite-first without recovery would have discarded encoded operational knowledge.
The engineering work
- legacy system reverse-engineering
- Groundwork documentation of architecture, data, and operational logic
- migration of 1M+ records to date
- rebuild designed around 20 operational roles
Risk / continuity
- Understanding and documentation preceded significant change so the rebuild would not depend solely on undocumented institutional knowledge.
- Data the business depends on has been migrated in volume (1M+ records to date) as part of moving off the fragile data layer.
Result / current state
1M+ records migrated to date. Rebuild designed around 20 operational roles. Engagement status: Active.