Enterprise · Replatform
McDaniels — Modernizing Enterprise Software
A complete replatform of a 25-year-old monolith serving 120,000+ people across 80+ facilities.
The problem
Over 25 years, McDaniels Supply Company had quietly become a software company without ever deciding to. What started as a supply business now provides services to 120,000+ individuals across 80+ correctional facilities — all running on a monolithic, aging platform. The system worked, but it couldn't scale, and the user experience had accumulated two decades of patches.
They didn't need a fresh coat of paint. They needed a complete replatform onto a modern, scalable codebase — without losing the deep, hard-won logic buried in the old system.
What we did
We came in as a strategic partner, not a vendor taking a spec. Our discovery process mapped the real breadth of the business: how 80+ facilities actually operate, where the monolith was load-bearing, and — critically — where there was new value to unlock beyond simply rebuilding what existed.
A replatform of this size is exactly where AI-enabled delivery earns its keep. We used AI to accelerate the unglamorous, high-risk part of the work — reading the legacy system, mapping its undocumented workflows, and turning twenty-five years of accumulated behavior into clear product documentation we could design and build against.
From there we streamlined a dated, dense experience into modern admin and facility-facing workflows: a clean operations dashboard (orders, phone time, transactions, locations at a glance) and a focused commissary experience for end users — ordering, grievances, visitation, scheduling, and more, in one place.
The commissary experience — ordering, grievances, visitation, scheduling in one place.
The result
McDaniels moved from a monolith they couldn't grow on to a modern experience and codebase built to scale. Along the way, our discovery surfaced new workflows and new value the original "just replatform it" brief never anticipated — the difference between rebuilding software and rethinking the business it runs.
Why it matters
This is enterprise modernization done as product strategy, not just engineering: understand the business deeply, use AI to de-risk the legacy mess, and ship something better than what came before — not just newer.