Building products distributor gains application-level observability and cost reporting with Redwood Insights

Company overview

Builders FirstSource (BFS) is one of North America’s largest suppliers of structural building products and value-added building materials for residential construction. The company has more than 600 locations across the United States and has grown rapidly through acquisition while continuing to modernize its operations.

Supporting that growth is a complex technology landscape that includes more than a dozen ERP systems and other business-critical applications. Reliable workload automation and operational observability are essential to keeping those systems running and maintaining business continuity.

Business challenges

As BFS expanded, its automation environment grew more complex. Business-critical processes supporting ERP operations, financial transactions, payment processing and data analytics generated thousands of automated workloads across the business, some of them initiating time-sensitive financial transactions as often as every 15 minutes.

RunMyJobs by Redwood reliably orchestrated all of it, but everything ran through a single queue. While the underlying automation stayed dependable, it was difficult to see workload health by application, spot recurring issues or give application owners meaningful reporting on the automation supporting their systems.

BFS also wanted a better way to demonstrate how automation supported the business to help application owners understand workload health, identify recurring issues and prioritize improvements using operational data instead of assumptions.

“If it doesn’t work, we need to know yesterday that it didn’t work,” says Wyatt Clouse, Senior IT Automation Engineer at BFS.

Solution

BFS has partnered with Redwood Software since 2020, first using ActiveBatch by Redwood before moving to RunMyJobs SaaS as its automation needs grew — and the team has continued to build on that relationship as its environment has evolved.

One of the most impactful changes came when BFS put Redwood Insights to work to improve observability. Rather than changing its underlying infrastructure, the team restructured its existing RunMyJobs environment, creating dedicated execution queues for individual business applications while continuing to run everything on the same highly available process servers. 

The new queue structure gave Redwood Insights the business context to report on workloads by application rather than as one undifferentiated environment. 

With Redwood Insights, the team can now:

• Monitor workload activity by business application
• Track job success rates over time
• Identify failed jobs quickly and drill into recurring issues
• Export application-specific reports to share with business stakeholders
• Estimate application-level automation costs to support internal showback reporting
• Help application owners prioritize optimization efforts using real workload data

Application-specific views, drilldowns and historical reporting in Redwood Insights gave BFS’s infrastructure team a clear, per-application picture of workload health — one it could package up and share with application owners to spot trends, discuss recurring issues and prioritize fixes together. Application-level context enabled BFS to report not only on workload health and performance but also on the automation costs associated with each business application. 

“Now we can tell application owners how many jobs we ran for them, over what period of time and what their success rate was,” says Clouse. “We can also accurately report on each application’s automation costs and communicate that back to application owners and the wider business.”

Results

Redwood Insights has changed how BFS prioritizes improvements across its automation environment. Instead of treating every failed job the same, the team uses workload data to focus on the issues most likely to affect the business.

“The reporting helps us target what developers work on,” Clouse explains. “If there’s a job that fails all the time, they’ll investigate why. If something runs longer than expected, they’ll look at how it can be optimized.”

That same data is helping BFS work through a challenge common to companies that grow by acquisition: automation built for a much smaller footprint. Many of BFS’s jobs were written decades ago, when the company operated a fraction of its current 600-plus locations, and some queries and processes haven’t scaled cleanly as the business has grown. With application-level reporting, BFS can now see which long-running jobs need attention and make optimization decisions based on how workloads are performing, rather than relying on assumptions. They can also demonstrate how automation resources are consumed across individual applications and provide application owners with data that supports planning and investment decisions. 

As the organization continues to grow, Clouse and the broader team now have a repeatable observability model that can scale alongside their evolving application landscape.

The future with Redwood

BFS plans to continue modernizing as it consolidates legacy ERP systems onto SAP over the coming years. With additional acquisitions expected and more business processes becoming standardized, consistent operational observability will only become more important.

As the team onboards new applications and modernizes existing systems, the infrastructure team will apply the same reporting model across its environment, giving application owners the ability to monitor workload health, prioritize improvements and maintain operational consistency throughout the organization’s transformation.

That standardized foundation also positions BFS to take advantage of ongoing Redwood innovation as its modernization strategy evolves, including Redwood Insights Premium, Redwood RangerAI and use of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to agentify existing business logic.