FTP INTEGRATION PATTERNS ACROSS ERP BOUNDARIES: DEPENDENT DEMAND FLOW ARCHITECTURES

File Transfer Protocol remains, more than two decades after more modern integration technologies emerged, one
of the most widely used mechanisms for exchanging demand and supply data between independently operated
ERP systems. It persists not out of inertia alone but because batch file exchange over FTP or its secure variants
remains simple, broadly compatible, and adequate for a meaningful share of integration scenarios, particularly
those involving dependent demand signals such as planned orders and purchase requisitions that do not require
sub-second latency.
This article presents a structured treatment of FTP-based integration patterns specifically for dependent demand
flow across ERP boundaries. It defines dependent demand and its propagation mechanics, compares three
principal FTP integration patterns, and provides architecture, file design, scheduling, security, performance,
governance, and migration guidance. The article combines structural diagrams, illustrative benchmark charts, and
an extensive set of reference tables to give integration architects a comprehensive, practical foundation.
Illustrative benchmark data presented in Section 12 shows a hub-and-spoke broker pattern achieving roughly 60
percent higher throughput than simple point-to-point batch exchange, while Section 8 shows that demand signal
latency scales sharply with batch frequency, from under half an hour at 15-minute intervals to well over three days
at weekly intervals

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