One distribution business we worked with was losing money in two directions at once. Sales would promise stock that had already been committed elsewhere, so orders were oversold and then unpicked in apologetic phone calls. At the same time buyers, unable to trust the numbers, hedged by over-ordering — so cash sat in slow-moving stock in one warehouse while another ran short. The root cause was simple to name and hard to live with: there was no single, current view of inventory across locations.
They had outgrown a patchwork of accounting software and warehouse spreadsheets. We implemented NetSuite to bring stock, orders and fulfilment into one place — but the software was the easy part. The hard part was the data and the habits.
The challenges we had to solve
- Item masters that disagreed between systems — the same product under three codes, units of measure that did not match, and pack sizes recorded inconsistently.
- Stock balances that nobody believed, so any migration would inherit numbers people already distrusted.
- Inter-warehouse transfers handled informally, with no clean record of goods in transit.
- A sales team used to working around the system, who had to be given a reason to work inside it.
How we approached it
We spent the first weeks on the item master, not the configuration. Working with the warehouse and purchasing teams, we de-duplicated products, settled the units of measure, and agreed one way of describing each item. Then we counted — a physical reconciliation of what was actually on the shelves against what the system claimed — so the opening balances in NetSuite were real rather than inherited fiction.
With clean masters and counted stock, we configured multi-location inventory so that availability reflected commitments and in-transit transfers, not just what had been received. We rolled it out one warehouse at a time, letting each site settle before moving on, and trained the sales desk against the actual ordering scenarios they hit under pressure rather than a generic demo.
Where it stands
The sales desk now quotes from stock it can actually see, across every location, and the buyers order against demand rather than against their own anxiety. Overselling has stopped being a daily occurrence, and the conversation about stock has moved from arguing over whose number is right to deciding what to do about it.