Founded in 1998, HGR*24 buys and sells surplus industrial equipment, connecting vendors looking to recoup capital on used equipment with buyers seeking an affordable alternative to new. Headquartered in Euclid, Ohio, the company serves customers worldwide, with locations across the US and online 24/7.
HGR*24 runs its entire operation — purchasing, inventory, sales, and accounting — through a single platform called DataFlo. Built more than a decade ago on a niche technology stack out of South Korea, the system had become a liability: Only one outside team, in a distant time zone, could support it, and the business had spent years building workarounds instead of better processes.
When HGR*24 decided it was time to modernize, the challenge was replacing the platform's foundation without ever pausing the workflows that keep purchase orders, shipments, and inventory counts moving.
Capmation's DataFlo modernization partnership helped HGR*24 reduce costs and risk while increasing efficiency, resulting in:
DataFlo's limitations showed up across HGR*24's business:
Here's how HGR*24 defined success:
Capmation had already spent time understanding DataFlo's legacy architecture, which gave the team a head start most partners wouldn't have had.
Rather than one high-risk cutover, Capmation and HGR*24 broke the rebuild into 5 phases, each covering one part of the business:
New user groups came online roughly every 3 months over about a year. If a module hit a snag, that group could fall back to the legacy system while it was fixed — the rest of the business kept running.
Early on, there was a plan to also migrate HGR*24's database to a different technology. The Capmation team evaluated it and ultimately recommended against it, as the switch carried real risk of breaking downstream processes, with no reliable way to test every edge case.
HGR*24 was able to keep its existing database and avoided that risk — and the additional costs — entirely.
Capmation moved HGR*24's platform from physical servers onto Amazon Web Services (AWS). That ended the need for contractor site visits for routine maintenance and gave HGR*24's lead technical manager, Collin Betori, the ability to make updates himself.
This shift also put the company's inventory photo archive on a backed-up system for the first time, eliminating a significant risk to operations.
The old process meant each worker had to write item details by hand at a machine, then walk back to a shared computer to log it, and then photograph the item separately on a digital camera to add later.
In a warehouse workers described as massive, the constant back-and-forth added up to several miles of walking a day just to get inventory recorded.
Capmation replaced that entire workflow with an iPad app that captures counts and photos directly against each item, on the spot, closing the gap between the warehouse floor and the system of record.
Collin Betori called it the single most valuable change in the entire project.
The relationship didn't end at go-live. Phase 5 shifted into ongoing backlog work — prioritized enhancements, integrations, and optimizations — keeping Capmation embedded as the system continues to evolve.
"They’ve proposed thoughtful ideas and created little improvements along the way. I have friends who have been using contractors in India, and they said that communicating effectively was the biggest problem. But Capmation is in the same time zone. If an emergency arose, users would message me along with the Capmation team, and they'd respond right away. They were on it."
— Collin Betori, Lead Technical Manager, HGR*24
Lessons from this project that apply to any business-critical modernization:
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