"With Eraser, we don't need to hire consultants, contractors, or part-time resources to help us create documentation and diagrams. Instead, the tool helps us handle the heavy production work so our Enterprise Architecture team can spend more time doing the work we're actually responsible for."

Nehme RouphaelLead Enterprise Architect at White Cap

How White Cap cuts first-draft architecture diagram turnaround time by more than 95% with Eraser

About White Cap

White Cap is a leading North American distributor of specialty construction supplies and safety products for professional contractors. The company operates 575 branches across North America, employs more than 12,000 people, and supports 200,000+ customers. Its enterprise architecture team helps White Cap understand and govern the technology environment behind that scale, including internal initiatives and periodic acquisitions.

The Challenge

Manual artifact production pulled White Cap’s architects away from architecture

As a leading construction supply distributor, White Cap combines large-scale manufacturing and distribution operations with a focused acquisition strategy to expand their reach and strengthen their offerings.

White Cap’s lead enterprise architect, Nehme Rouphael, helps document and govern architecture across applications, integrations, infrastructure, data, security, technology platforms, and business capabilities. He works with a cross-functional enterprise architecture team and solution architects to produce artifacts for project planning, governance, and technical decisions.

Whether White Cap is starting an internal IT project or assessing an acquired company, Nehme needs a reliable view of the current architecture before teams can make informed decisions. That means mapping systems and workflows, identifying dependencies, and understanding which capabilities cannot be disrupted. Acquisitions make this especially visible because information may be outdated, inconsistent, or held by SMEs rather than documented in a common format.

To bring consistency to discovery, Nehme created structured Excel intake templates for project teams and acquired companies to capture requirements, integrations, and dependencies. But the templates only standardized the input. The team still had to translate responses into as many as eight architecture views in Visio, rebuild diagrams from other tools to meet White Cap’s standards, and turn the finished visuals into technical design documents.

For acquisition work, creating or rebuilding those views could take four to five weeks. For Nehme, the wider manual burden contributed to 60- to 70-hour weeks and sometimes required contractors or part-time support just to keep diagrams and documentation current.

Nehme explored Claude, Copilot, and architecture-focused AI agents, but sensitive network, security, routing, and IP information made public AI difficult to operationalize. Sanitizing the data would only recreate manual work.

White Cap needed a governed system that could automate first drafts, quickly apply company standards, and preserve architect-led validation. Nehme’s search led him to Eraser.

“Before Eraser, we spent weeks manually creating and rebuilding architecture diagrams in Visio. From requirements and intake through stakeholder review, almost every step required manual effort.”

The Solution

Eraser turns business system data into governed, review-ready architecture drafts

Onboarding was collaborative from the start. Eraser’s team partnered with Nehme on a phased rollout, helping White Cap document enterprise requirements such as single sign-on and GitHub integration. White Cap’s security team assessed Eraser and the proposed deployment before approving the purchase. That model gave White Cap a governed way to work with sensitive architecture information without moving it into a public AI workflow or adding data-sanitization steps.

Then, Eraser led a two-hour working session showing White Cap’s enterprise architecture core team how to generate, review, and refine diagrams. “The Eraser team took the time to walk us through the application and answer all our questions,” Nehme says.

From there, White Cap put Eraser to work on a recent acquisition. In the resulting workflow, Nehme supplies project requirements or acquisition intake data, and Eraser quickly generates editable architecture views for the technical team. These details give White Cap a clear picture of how key systems and integrations fit together.

“Even if we don’t give the platform a lot of information, it offers useful suggestions,” Nehme explains. “We can then pass those ideas along to our solution architects to build on top of.”

Eraser automatically applies White Cap’s visual standards using custom templates, colors, connectors, and taxonomy. Instead of opening a blank canvas or reformatting diagrams from other tools, solution architects start with a consistent first draft. Once the diagrams are complete, but subject to architect review, they can be used to draft the accompanying technical design document, reducing another manual handoff.

Nehme then reviews the generated views, corrects source information, and refines any relationships before sending them to technical and business stakeholders for validation. This trust-and-validate model keeps architects accountable for accuracy while Eraser handles much of the production work.

Today, Eraser streamlines the first-draft work that once slowed White Cap’s path from initial documentation to architecture review. With those tasks handled in the background, Nehme and his team move away from production work. Instead, they spend their time fine-tuning source data and validating architecture.

“With Eraser, I no longer spend weeks generating visual diagrams manually. Eraser can get us to a useful first draft within hours, which gives me much more time to focus on the architecture itself.”

The Result

A sustainable workweek with more time for enterprise architecture

White Cap’s documentation workflow shifted from four to five weeks of manual diagram production to hours of generation and two days of architect-led review. This repeatable process gives the team a fast, reliable way to understand current-state architecture, whether for an internal system or a newly acquired company, and make integration decisions with confidence.

Even better? White Cap no longer needs outside help to produce diagrams and documentation. Nehme says workweeks that once reached 60 to 70 hours now end at 40. He also spends more time improving the team’s integration playbook and strengthening architecture standards, and he’s able to join critical project discussions sooner.

Going forward, White Cap plans to connect Eraser to tools like ServiceNow via MCP, making architecture data easier to surface and use across the business. Nehme is also eager to use the platform to lay the groundwork for an enterprise architecture knowledge base that can inform future design recommendations.

“Eraser gives us diagrams we can trust without spending all our time checking them. Instead of spending my time drawing things up manually, I have time back to do the job I was hired to do.”