Just Under 30,000 SKUs and About 430 Orders a Day

The Challenge

The order management tool they were running was being shut down by its provider, on top of a website replatform already scheduled for two months out. Every other system they had demoed covered part of the job. Some handled order processing well and warehousing badly. Some did no shipping at all.

The bigger operational challenge was dropshipping. Between forty and sixty percent of orders per month route to external vendors, and one SKU can come from several different places depending on the variables. Only one vendor exposes an API. The rest are presumed inventory levels or a portal login. Those routing decisions were being made manually.

Kitting added another layer. Products sell as kits made up of several individual components, and the fulfillment side has to see the components rather than the kit.

“I didn’t think that we’re all that complicated in how we operate, but apparently we are.”

GM General ManagerAuto Parts Distributor

Why SkuNexus

The GM had been back to back with demos for six months and knew the space. What he asked about on this call was vendor routing, kit handling, and batch picking with barcode scanning, and each one was answered against the running product rather than a roadmap.

The wave picking walkthrough drew the reaction below.

“We’re going to fire like three people. Just kidding.”

GM General ManagerAuto Parts Distributor (on seeing the wave picking demo)

What the Sessions Covered

Vendor Routing Rules

The requirement discussed was rules that decide the dropship source per line item instead of a person deciding. The session covered how routing rules are written and how one order can be split so that one line ships from the warehouse and another goes to a vendor.

Kits and Their Components

The requirement discussed was that a kit sold as one line resolves to its individual components for picking, and that component level stock stays visible when those components are also sold on their own.

Wave Picking with Barcode Verification

The session walked through grouping orders into one pass through the warehouse rather than one walk per order, with scanning at each step, and through filtering a wave down to single line orders that contain the same SKU.

One Pipeline for Warehouse and Dropship

The requirement discussed was one queue covering both fulfillment models, with each order or each line inside an order sent to a warehouse pick, a vendor dropship, or split across both.

The Results

A 30,000+ SKU operation running 430 orders a day across three marketplaces with a hybrid warehouse-and-dropship model now runs through a single platform. The vendor routing that used to require manual decisions happens automatically. The wave picking that replaced paper lists cut the labor math dramatically. And the marketplace-specific kit logic that used to create fulfillment errors is now handled by the system before the warehouse team ever sees the order.