One idempotent pipeline that turns retail purchase orders into shipped, invoiced, reconciled revenue across multiple 3PLs, with humans touching only the exceptions.
The client is a consumer-goods brand that grew up on Shopify Plus and NetSuite and had just landed its first national retail account. That account mandated full EDI compliance, and the team was about to run order-to-cash for it on spreadsheets and manual NetSuite entry. The bottleneck wasn't demand. It was the back office.
01 The Challenge
Winning the retail account was the trigger. With it came non-negotiable EDI requirements: 850 purchase orders in, 856 advance ship notices and 810 invoices back, 940 shipping orders out to the warehouse, all on the retailer's deadlines, with chargebacks for every late ASN or mismatched invoice.
Underneath, the existing process couldn't carry it. Orders from Shopify, wholesale, and the new retail channel were keyed into NetSuite by hand. Fulfillment was split across two 3PLs with routing decided manually. Returns lived in spreadsheets. And revenue from Shopify, Stripe, and Recharge subscriptions never cleanly tied out to NetSuite. Month-end close meant hours of reconciling exports.
Headcount wasn't the answer. A pipeline was.
02 The Approach
The governing rule: the system is the source of truth; people handle only the exceptions. Every document that moves (PO, ASN, invoice, shipment, return, payout) is processed idempotently and is retry-safe, so a re-sent EDI file or a duplicated webhook can never double-book an order or a dollar.
The key decision was to own the EDI translation layer rather than bolt on a generic VAN connector. Off-the-shelf gets you a feed; it doesn't get you the retailer-specific quirks, the routing logic across two 3PLs, or clean reconciliation back into NetSuite. Owning the maps meant new trading partners became a config exercise, not a project.
What we deliberately did not do: no rip-and-replace of NetSuite, no custom WMS (the 3PLs stay), and no offshore handoff. The engineer who scoped it wrote it.
03 The Build
The pipeline ingests demand from every channel (Shopify Admin API for e-commerce, inbound EDI 850s for retail) and normalizes each into a NetSuite sales order via SuiteQL and RESTlets. A routing engine assigns each order to the right 3PL by SKU, inventory, and destination, then emits a 940 to that warehouse. Shipment confirmations come back, fire the 856 ASN to the retailer on time, and trigger the 810 invoice. Returns are captured and posted automatically. In parallel, a reconciliation service matches Stripe and Recharge payouts and Shopify orders against NetSuite, flagging only the true breaks.
Python runs across EDI translation, orchestration, and reconciliation, with strictly typed schemas validating every document at the boundary. Temporal Cloud runs the durable order-to-cash workflows, so a stall mid-flight resumes safely and no document is ever processed twice.
04 The Results
Manual order entry dropped ~95%; the team now works exceptions, not data entry. EDI trading-partner onboarding fell from ~6 weeks to 3 days, so the next retail account is no longer a back-office project. ASN and invoice timeliness hit retailer SLAs, and compliance chargebacks went to near zero. Revenue reconciliation across Stripe, Recharge, and Shopify runs automatically with under 0.5% exceptions, cutting days off month-end close. Inventory and order status are visible in real time across both 3PLs.
05 What's Next
The same pattern (owned EDI maps + a 3PL routing engine + NetSuite as system of record + durable workflows) is now a tuned baseline. Adding a channel, a 3PL, or a new retailer starts from the existing build, not a blank page. It's the foundation the next contribution-margin and attribution work for this brand plugs into.
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