Dropping the Chaos: Our New Automated Dropship Workflow Between Two NetSuite Orgs

Automation in Action
1

Hi everyone,

A couple of years ago our company acquired a sister brand that also runs on NetSuite. The two businesses quickly discovered huge cross-selling opportunities, and with that came a surge of intercompany dropshipments:

  • Then: maybe a few dozen per month
  • Now: ~500 transactions every month and still climbing

The Pain

Until now we’ve “managed” this process with…

  • Email threads back and forth (“Hey, here’s the PO, can you ship today?”)
  • Spreadsheet trackers that inevitably go out of sync
  • Manual entry on both sides (Sales Orders -> POs -> Item Fulfillments)

Inevitably we hit:

  • Duplicate shipments :skull:
  • Price mismatches (one side updates a cost, the other doesn’t)
  • Accounting headaches (reconciling intercompany A/R & A/P feels like detective work and costs us dozens of staff-hours every month)

The Solution

We decided to automate the entire lifecycle:

  1. Trigger: Company A creates a dropship Purchase Order with Company B as the vendor which populates a saved search
  2. Order Flow: A flow pushes that order directly into Company B’s NetSuite as a Sales Order (no email, no spreadsheets). While generating the SO, the average cost of each item is fetched and set as the price per line. These prices are then written back to the originating Purchase Order on Company A's NetSuite to ensure numbers align
  3. Fulfillment Flow: When Company B ships, the Item Fulfillment (with tracking, quantities, serial numbers, etc.) flows back to create an item fulfillment in Company A's NetSuite
  4. Auditing: Correlating document numbers are populated on each side to streamline auditing and issue handling

Current Status

  • I have wrapped up development and successfully tested different scenarios
  • The system is in UAT this week to ensure the business is satisfied and assess any potential improvements
  • Go-live is targeted for next week once UAT sign-off lands

What We Expect to Gain

  • Zero duplicate shipments
  • Price accuracy at the point of posting (accountants stop chasing pennies)
  • Time back (Early estimates show we’ll reclaim 150-180 hours/month across both ops
    and accounting teams)

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6 Likes
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@jaredfraley This is great! Thanks for sharing and the way you laid it out makes it easy to follow.

It was great to see the progression of this, from a volume that was manageable with a manual process, to seeing order volumes grow and the problems that come along with that. Seeing the problem and coming up with a plan to solve it is awesome to see. How long did it take you to develop the new flows (understanding you are still completing UAT)?

1 Like
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Thanks, of course!

Planning, development, and personal testing of a MVP only took a couple days (with various unrelated interruptions along the way). I was having trouble with the structure initially and had to keep reconstructing to work around a few issues with multi-line, multi-tracking, multi-packages, etc. but finally got it working.

An enhancement request to handle serial numbers was made and that took a few hours due to an issue with one company using NetSuite WMS and the inventory detail creation not working directly from Celigo so I had to write a script to handle it within NetSuite. It works perfectly fine now but I am still going to go back and look into how I can do it without the need for a script on NetSuite. The other company uses another WMS and just uses a custom column field to store serial numbers, so that was a quick 5 minute update.

1 Like
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Hey Jared, it sounds like a perfect opportunity to leverage some of our support tools for exactly solving quick "next steps". Would you send me direct message your contact info? I saw 3 different matches for your name