SupplierWiki curates detailed articles to help suppliers win at retail.

Don't let Walmart Post-Audits catch you off guard in 2025. Join Allie and Bekah to learn best practices for preventing and disputing Post Audits.

Prepping for Walmart Audits

Post Audits are preventable and disputable! Join Allie and Bekah to learn how to best prepare for Walmart Post Audits.

Articles

Supply Chain Operations Buying Guide

An EDI & B2B Integration Buying Guide. How to evaluate EDI providers, B2B integration platforms, and supply chain compliance solutions, and the questions that separate a true network partner from a do-it-yourself toolkit.

SPS Commerce operates an intelligent network that has built and maintained more trading-partner connections than any other provider, spanning 300,000+ trading relationships across retailers, grocers, and distributors. That network learns continuously from 750M+ transactions a year, so it recognizes what normal looks like for your trading partners and catches problems before they reach your business, not after. That depth of experience and intelligence is what gets brands retail ready and their products onto shelves, leading to repeat orders and expanded distribution, with the goal of full compliance and zero lost revenue on every order. 

This guide focuses on the starting point for most brands: EDI. But it doesn't stop at the first connection. SPS gets suppliers to retail compliance as fast as, or faster than, anyone else, in part because SPS makes the connection directly instead of handing suppliers a tool and stepping back. 

This guide reflects what we've learned helping brands succeed with buying organizations over time, not just clearing a one-time compliance checkbox that breaks later and costs you sales. 

It also draws on conversations with brands that left SPS for promises of lower cost, faster onboarding, or more configurability elsewhere. In practice, those promises didn't hold up. The gaps showed up as compliance failures, missed orders, and unplanned costs, real financial impact that brought these brands back to SPS. 

Take Ultimate Trading International, a U.S. jewelry supplier that started with SPS on a single retail customer. When a competitor pitched a lower price, faster implementation, and full ERP integration, Ultimate Trading switched. Six months later, the competitor had partially onboarded one customer, inventory integration was incomplete, and a promised shipping label capability didn't exist. When billing shifted to hourly for unfinished work, Ultimate Trading came back to SPS and was back online the same day. SPS then built a full, bidirectional ERP integration across all seven of their retail customers in eight weeks, the same scope the previous vendor had spent six months failing to deliver, going live 15 days ahead of schedule. "Experience counts," says Devendra Samdani, Head of IT at Ultimate Trading International. "When I was working with the other company, I realized they were testing on us, and we were paying for that while our business was on the edge." 

If you're evaluating EDI providers or B2B integration platforms right now, or B2B commerce platforms, you're probably comparing features, timelines, and pricing. Those things matter. But the criteria most teams focus on early: speed to connect, number of trading partners, price per transaction, often aren't the criteria that predict whether an implementation actually reduces your compliance burden or eliminates chargebacks. 

The right evaluation starts with a different question: when something breaks or changes, and it will, who handles it? 

This guide gives you a framework for evaluating any EDI, B2B integration, or supply chain compliance solution. It includes the questions to ask every vendor, what to look for in a demo, and the supply chain compliance checklist that separates a capable tool from a network partner. 

A Day in the Life of a Supply Chain Operations Leader

Before you've opened your laptop, a retailer has flagged two chargebacks. One for a labeling error you can't trace, one for an ASN that arrived four hours past the window. You were compliant. You think. You have 60 days of transaction history to prove it, somewhere. 

Maybe you're a founder who just landed your first major retailer, doing all of this yourself between everything else running the business. Maybe you're two people running supply chain operations for a brand doing $5M to $300M in revenue. Either way, that scene is familiar. You manage orders, warehouse execution, EDI compliance, supplier relationships, and retailer scorecards; often with a team of one or two. When something breaks, it breaks on you. 

Most operations leaders at this scale are not failing because they are doing the wrong things. They are failing because they are doing the right things manually, at a scale that manual processes were never designed to handle. 

The Right Framework: Network Partner vs. a Toolkit

Before comparing features, understand the fundamental difference between the two types of solutions in this market. 

A toolkit gives your team software to manage EDI and B2B integrations. You get a connection to the trading partner network, a portal to manage mappings, and support documentation. Your IT team, or a consultant, does the implementation work: building integrations, translating retailer requirements into your system, and updating your configuration when requirements change. 

Toolkits are legitimate products. For large organizations with dedicated EDI teams and IT resources, they can work well. The critical question isn't just whether your team has the bandwidth to own what comes after the initial setup, it's whether your business can absorb the risk while they're building that capability. Compliance failures put up to 5% of revenue at risk, which for many brands is roughly half of operating profit, and the damage doesn't stop at one chargeback: disputes pile up, retailer relationships strain, and the promotional slots and new business that depend on a clean compliance record get harder to win. 

A network partner operates a compounding network on your behalf: connections aren't rebuilt one customer at a time, they're maintained once and shared by everyone on the network. Their team handles setup, trading partner communication, ongoing maintenance, and compliance updates, so the relationship stays strong and your business is retail ready every day. That network already includes thousands of retailers, including seven of the top 10 retailers in the country, so when one of them changes a requirement, it gets fixed once and every supplier connected to them benefits, not just you. Your configuration updates automatically. You don't find out at chargeback time. That's the difference in risk, not just workload: the disputes, strained retailer relationships, and lost promotional slots that follow a compliance failure aren't things your team has to weather, because the failure doesn't happen in the first place. 

The distinction is not a feature. It's a question of who does the work and who holds the risk when things change. 

"When a retailer changes their compliance requirements, who handles that, and how fast?" The answer to this single question tells you more about a provider's model than any demo or feature list. 

As you assess any EDI or B2B integration provider (sometimes marketed as a B2B commerce platform), the right framework isn't product categories; it's what the solution actually does across three operating needs: connecting your data and partners, orchestrating the flows that keep orders moving, and optimizing performance over time. Evaluate any provider against all three. 

Your supply chain runs on data moving between systems and trading partners, item specs, inventory levels, orders, shipments, invoices, payments. This is electronic purchasing in practice: orders and confirmations moving between you and your trading partners without someone re-keying them by hand. That gets harder when your tech stack isn't one clean system: your ERP, WMS, and OMS may come from different vendors, and most providers have a generic connector for each one rather than real expertise in how they actually behave together. When that data isn't connected, standardized, and current, every downstream process pays the price. Most operations teams underestimate how much manual effort goes into maintaining these connections as systems change and trading partner requirements evolve. 

Translation and mapping are table stakes; nearly every provider does this. The real question is what happens after the file is translated: does the system know this retailer's actual current requirements, or just the format? 

Connected data is necessary but not sufficient, and it shouldn't matter which channel it arrives through. SPS's order automation is channel-agnostic: it turns EDI transactions and PDF orders into the same clean, tracked order in the same system, so a PDF order from a smaller trading partner gets the same automation as an EDI order from your biggest retailer, instead of sitting in an inbox waiting to be typed in by hand. Say a retailer swaps its ASN requirements mid-quarter, or a warehouse mis-packs a case two weeks before peak season, the order doesn't stop moving just because something went wrong. Someone still has to catch the exception, figure out who's responsible, fix it, and keep the shipment on schedule. Most teams find out about these breaks after a scorecard or a deduction shows up, not while there's still time to act. The work is in keeping the flows running across every trading partner and every connection type, EDI or not: getting partners ready, moving orders through the right path, coordinating shipments across warehouses and carriers, catching compliance failures before they become chargebacks, and recovering revenue when deductions hit. Each of these flows has exceptions. What separates providers is who handles them. 

Most operations teams make decisions based on what they shipped, not what sold, and find out about compliance failures after the penalty has arrived. Without visibility across partners, products, and business outcomes, improvement is reactive. The right solution gives you data to act on before problems compound. 

What is an Order Management System (OMS)?  

Most explanations of the order management system (OMS) are written for a brand that ships parcels to shoppers. A supplier selling into Walmart, Target, or Home Depot has no cart or carrier in the middle of the transaction. The order arrives as a structured file from the retailer, and the retailer expects several structured files back on a schedule it sets. The definition of an order management system therefore matters less than its boundary, which is what this article covers. 

An order management system is software that manages order data. It takes in orders from every channel a company sells through, checks them for problems, decides which inventory should fill them, and tracks them until the goods arrive. Four jobs sit inside that description: 

What an order management system does not do is as important: it does not pick, pack, or ship anything; it does not post revenue to the general ledger or decide what should happen to an order and communicate that with other systems. 

Three systems touch an order, and each owns a different part of it. An enterprise resource planning system (ERP) runs the business record. A warehouse management system (WMS) runs the building. The OMS sits between them and runs the order. 

Inventory appears in all three, which is the usual source of confusion. The ERP holds inventory for valuation and purchasing. The OMS reads available inventory to decide what it can promise. The WMS tracks inventory by bin, carton, and pallet so someone can find it. 

No standards body publishes this division. It is industry convention, and vendors draw the lines differently. Most ERP systems include order entry, and many suppliers run for years on that alone. 

Which System Answers the Retailer’s Purchase Order? 

For a supplier, this question decides everything else. Retail orders arrive through electronic data interchange (EDI), a standard format that lets two companies exchange business documents without anyone retyping them. The formats are maintained by 

 that has developed EDI standards for more than 40 years. 

The sequence is short, and each document has one job: 

Where Each Document Actually Comes From 

Those five documents do not all come from one system. The 855 comes from wherever order data lives. The 856 usually comes from wherever shipping data lives, which is often the warehouse system rather than the order system. In one worked supplier example, 

 while the accounting system generates the invoice.while the accounting system generates the invoice. 

That is why “do I need an order management system” is the wrong first question. The better one is whether every document in the sequence has a system responsible for producing it, correctly, on the retailer’s clock. 

Does an Order Management System Handle EDI? 

The answer varies by system. Some order management systems read and write EDI documents directly. Others hand that work to a separate integration layer and only receive the translated order. Many ERP systems accept an order but can’t produce a compliant acknowledgment or ASN at all. 

What EDI Order Management Actually Covers 

EDI order management is a set of capabilities rather than a single product category. Because of that, suppliers evaluating software tend to ask about the documents rather than the category. Useful questions include: 

An answer of “we integrate with an EDI provider” is a real answer. It means the documents are somebody else’s job, and a supplier should know whose. 

What Happens When the Documents Are Wrong or Late? 

The cost shows up in payment, not in an error message on a screen. Retailers check the invoice against both the PO and the ASN, a check commonly called a 

. When the three documents disagree, even by a single case, payment is held until someone investigates. 

The ASN carries the most operational weight, because retailers use it for receiving and labor planning. Late or inaccurate ship notices are one of the largest causes of chargebacks, and a missing ASN can lead a retailer’s system to reject an entire shipment at the dock. So the question is whether a supplier’s systems can build accurate documents without a person checking each one by hand. 

Do You Need an Order Management System Yet? 

Many suppliers do not, at least not immediately. Suppliers early in a retail relationship often run on an ERP plus a web-based EDI service, where staff enter shipment details online and the service formats and sends the documents. Larger suppliers connect EDI software directly to their systems so documents move without manual work. Some use value-added networks, which pass documents securely between trading partners. 

The pressure to buy an OMS usually arrives with a second or third channel. One retailer, one warehouse, and a few hundred orders a week can be managed inside an ERP. Add a marketplace and a direct channel, each with its own rules, and order data stops fitting in a system built for accounting. 

One question sorts most of this out: which system would send an accurate ship notice tomorrow if a retailer added a new distribution center? A stack with a clear answer is working, and a stack without one has a gap worth closing before the next mandate. 

Is an order management system the same thing as an ERP? 

No. An ERP runs the money and the business record. An order management system runs the orders and decides what can be promised. Most ERP systems include order entry, which is a smaller job. 

Does a small supplier need an order management system to sell to a big retailer? 

Not always. Retailers care about the documents, not the software you bought. A supplier that sends an accurate 855, 856, and 810 on time meets the rule. Those files can come from an ERP, an EDI service, or a dedicated order system. 

Which retail document causes the most problems? 

The advance ship notice. Retailers rely on it to plan receiving and staffing, and late or wrong notices are a leading cause of chargebacks. 

Who generates the advance ship notice, the order system or the warehouse system? 

It depends on the stack, and that is why the question matters. Shipping detail usually lives in the warehouse system, so the notice often starts there rather than in the order system. 

Want To Go Deeper on What Your Retailer Expects? 

It is worth working out which system owns which document before a retailer sets a deadline. SPS Commerce publishes free supplier education at 

. You will find plain-language guides to each document in the order sequence. 

Supplier Diversification Strategy: How To Protect Margin During a Sourcing Transition 

____________________________________________________________________________ 

Most writing about a supplier diversification strategy stops at the decision: which country, which supplier, what the landed cost looks like on a spreadsheet. That analysis matters, and by the time a team is mid-transition it is already done. The harder question starts the day after the contract is signed. 

The margin risk sits in the changeover itself. New item data has to reach your systems and your retailers accurately. A new 

 (EDI) connection has to be built and tested. Retailer compliance has to hold while one source winds down and another ramps. Each step has a failure mode with a dollar figure attached, and none of them show up in the sourcing model. 

Why Does Switching Suppliers Cost More Than the Switch Suggests? 

Sourcing changes are now routine. Deloitte’s 

 surveyed 330 retail executives. Of those, 66 percent plan to restructure supply chains through onshoring, nearshoring, or supplier diversification if input costs rise this year. Another 95 percent expect costs to rise because of trade policy. 

What that activity hides is that the fix has its own price. Lifetime Brands said so plainly in its 

. The company’s tariff mitigation strategy was meant to hold gross margin dollars steady, and may therefore lower gross margin percentage. The filing also describes carrying more inventory value, paying duties before the goods sold, and moving production across the supply base. This is a company running a plan it chose, saying in writing that the plan moves margin. 

The same pattern holds at smaller scale. A transition can run two weeks long. A new supplier can spend a month getting a retailer’s requirements right. Either one can cost more than the duty it was meant to avoid. 

What Do Tariff Mitigation Strategies for Suppliers Actually Cost? 

Sourcing shifts move slower than the policy changes that set them off. At Manifest 2026, Brooklinen COO Rachel Levy told a panel that 

. The company has not been chasing countries in response to new tariffs or trade deals. US-sourced cotton avoids some duties, she said, but supply is limited, and leaning on it too hard would add complexity elsewhere. 

Patagonia points the same direction. Chief Supply Chain Officer Todd Soller said on that panel that some sourcing moved from Asia to Central America, with a small amount in the US. The supply base itself has not changed much, partly because tariffs raised the water level fairly equally across the world. 

The legal ground keeps moving too. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in 

 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not give the president the power to set tariffs. Those orders were invalidated soon after. Tariffs under other authorities, including Section 232 and Section 301, are still in force. One legal basis went away and others did not. The math behind a nearshoring versus offshoring comparison can shift again before a transition finishes. 

Where Does Margin Leak During Supplier Onboarding? 

Protecting margins during supply chain disruption comes down to how well the handoff runs. The failure points are specific and they repeat. 

A new supplier means new item data: UPCs, dimensions, case pack configurations, product descriptions, hazard classifications. That data has to match what the retailer already has on file. When it does not, the retailer can’t receive the goods cleanly, and the correction happens after the shipment instead of before it. 

 tells a retailer what is arriving, in what cartons, on what pallets, before the truck reaches the dock. A new supplier sending its first ASNs through a new connection is the most likely moment for that document to be late, incomplete, or mismatched against the physical shipment. Retailers assess penalties for all three. 

Compliance Requirements That Arrive Late 

Routing guides, labeling specifications, and packaging rules differ by retailer and change without much warning. A supplier that has never shipped to your retailers has not absorbed any of it yet. The requirements often reach the new supplier after the first purchase orders do. 

Each of the above generates deductions, and deductions arrive weeks after the shipment that caused them. By the time a finance team sees the first wave on a remittance, the new supplier has already shipped several more loads the same way. The lag is what makes the total surprising. 

Flow diagram: Handoff begins → Item setup errors → Late or wrong ASNs → Compliance rules arrive late → Chargebacks weeks later, with a branch from 'Late or wrong ASNs' to 'Sell-through flags it first.'

supplier onboarding margin leak flowchart.png

What Onboarding at Scale Looks Like When It Works 

MSC Industrial Supply Co works the distributor side of this problem, not the supplier side, so the parallel is directional rather than exact. The mechanism is still the same. In 

, MSC brought new suppliers online smoothly, from large enterprises down to small family operations, and cut overstocked inventory without falling short of demand. Connection quality and data quality are what made the onboarding repeatable. 

Does a Dual Sourcing Strategy in Manufacturing Multiply the Risk? 

 cuts concentration risk, which is the reason to do it. It also doubles the onboarding events, compliance relationships, and item data sets your team maintains. Two suppliers for one component means two sets of specifications to keep current and two connections that can fail on their own. 

That tradeoff is worth making and worth planning. In its 

, WTW recommends a practice that carries straight over to sourcing work: 

Companies that do this before a transition tend to discover that the constraint is rarely the supplier itself. It is usually the time and staff needed to 

How Do You Spot a Bad Transition Before It Reaches the P&L? 

Sell-through and inventory data from your retailers is the earliest honest signal that a transition is going badly. Units stop moving at certain stores. Inventory sits where it should be turning. A region quits reordering. These signs show up weeks before the deduction detail and the quarterly margin number catch up. 

Suppliers who see this early have usually solved the access problem first. Leatherman spent years asking retailer buyers for spreadsheets before meetings, then decoding whatever format came back. Once the data landed in one steady view, the company had 

. Wolverine put the same kind of retail data in front of its sales teams every Monday to find regions, stores, and products that needed attention. In one case the data turned up untapped sales, and 

Neither company was running a sourcing transition. The capability is the same: enough view of what is actually selling to catch a problem while it is still small. During a transition, that window is short. 

How long does it usually take to fully onboard a new supplier? 

It depends on retailer complexity and the supplier’s existing EDI capability, but the connection is rarely the long pole. Item data accuracy and compliance readiness usually decide when a new source can ship without drawing deductions. 

Should we hold the old supplier while the new one ramps? 

Many companies do, and that overlap is a real cost worth modeling. A hard cutover packs every onboarding failure into the same weeks your fill rate is exposed. 

Does nearshoring reduce this execution risk? 

Not on its own. A nearshore supplier still needs correct item data, a working connection, and current retailer requirements. Shorter transit times help you recover faster from a mistake, which is not the same as making fewer of them. 

What is the first sign a transition is eroding margin? 

Usually a change in sell-through or inventory position at a few accounts, followed weeks later by deduction volume. The finance signal arrives last. 

Want a Clearer View of How a Sourcing Transition Is Actually Performing? 

A sourcing transition throws off scattered, hard-to-trust data: new supplier performance, shifting landed cost, sell-through by SKU across different retailers. 

 brings retail sales, inventory, and item performance into one steady view, so a transition going sideways shows up while there is still time to fix it. To be plain about the fit: Analytics is the layer that catches margin erosion early. It is not the tool that picks your new supplier. 

 has practical resources on supplier onboarding, compliance, and chargeback recovery. 

This article discusses trade policy and tariff developments for general informational purposes only. It is not legal, tax, or customs advice, and requirements change. Consult qualified counsel before making sourcing or compliance decisions.

Purchase Order Visibility: Why Buyers Still Call Logistics To Find Out Where a PO Is 

A buyer at a specialty retailer needs to know the status of a purchase order. There is open-to-buy budget committed to that order. If the PO lands after the selling window, canceling it and spending the money elsewhere is the better call. Finding out the status means logging into a transportation management system (TMS) nobody trained the buyer to use, calling the logistics team, emailing the vendor for a tracking number, and then checking the carrier website by hand. 

That is four systems and two other people for a question with a one-line answer. The logistics analyst on the other end of that call has the mirror image of the problem. A large share of their day goes to answering questions from buyers, stores, and receiving staff who can’t see the information themselves. 

Why Does It Take Four Systems To Answer One Question About a PO? 

The data almost always exists somewhere. A 

 of SPS Commerce found that retail teams usually have “all of the necessary tools and technology to run at operational capacity”. The first symptom of supply chain inefficiency the study lists is manual PO follow-up. 

What is missing is a path from the data to the person who needs it. PO statuses piles up in systems built around functions rather than questions. The TMS holds freight movements, and the carrier portal holds the last scan. The warehouse management system (WMS) holds receiving, while 

 carries the documents that pass between retailer and supplier. Each system is right about its own slice and silent about the rest, so one person ends up doing work the software should do. 

The delay that adds up is what costs money. A 

 found that responding to a disruption takes two weeks on average. That is longer than the weekly cycle most operations teams run on. Gartner puts the same gap another way, reporting that 

Four groups need PO status, and what decisions each one of them makes shapes what they need to see. 

A buyer manages open-to-buy against a category budget. The question is whether to keep waiting on an order or cancel it and redeploy the money. That decision needs order status and some sense of whether the delay is recoverable, not the freight itinerary that fills a logistics tool. 

This team can find the answer, which is why it gets asked. Time spent looking up statuses for other departments is time not spent on the routing problems only this team can fix. Every lookup done on someone else’s behalf also happens later than it needed to. 

Payment disputes rely on what the advance ship notice (ASN) declared against what arrived. The ASN is the supplier document listing what is on the truck before it gets there. Reconciling a short shipment means following one PO from creation through receipt, and across several systems; that is an afternoon of work. 

Distribution Centers and Store Operations 

Receiving staff and store teams know their delivery rhythm without knowing what is on the trucks. Staffing a dock or preparing for an advertised event against unknown inbound volume is guesswork. These teams also sit furthest from the systems holding the answer. 

What Is PO Lifecycle Visibility, and How Is It Different From Transit Visibility? 

Transit visibility answers where a shipment is right now. PO lifecycle visibility follows the whole order: creation, supplier acknowledgement, shipment, the ASN, receipt at the distribution center, and delivery to the store. 

That difference matters because the costly failures are usually things that did not happen: maybe nobody acknowledged the order, the ASN never arrived, or a booking window closed with no action taken. A tool built to track a moving truck has nothing to say about an event that never happened, so these show up at receiving. By then a fix is either expensive or out of reach. 

A consumer delivery tracker is the closest familiar version. The value is in the named stages that the order moves through, more than just the driver’s location on a map. When one stage goes quiet, you can see which one, and you can see it right away. 

A specialty retailer pulled TMS, WMS, carrier, and ASN data into a single view and 

. The categories using it the most ran a 94.1 percent fill rate, against 87.6 percent elsewhere in the business. 

The aggregate figure is hard to picture, so the item-level numbers in the same case are more useful. Two fast-moving consumables categories were tracked item by item across 52 weeks. In the category with lighter use, 18.8 percent of active stock-keeping units (SKUs) went out of stock during their selling window. In the heavier-use category, 11.4 percent did. Estimated lost retail for the former was around $204,000 against roughly $64,000 for the latter. 

The Same Miss Costs More the Later It Surfaces 

One missed routing window carries a different price depending on when somebody notices. Two or three weeks out, the retailer and supplier can work a fix at standard cost. In this case, moving shipments off air freight and onto ocean was worth about $96,000 a year. Noticed at receiving, the options narrow to expedited freight or a late delivery. Noticed after the promotion has run, what is left is a markdown. 

Why Inbound Supply Chain Visibility Has To Reach the Supplier Too 

A missing acknowledgement only helps if the supplier acts on it, and a call from a buyer is a slow and uneven way to make that happen. Systems that notify the supplier automatically when a checkpoint is missed close that loop without anyone having to remember. This is a data and notification job rather than a freight one. The retailer and supplier still decide what to do about the shipment. What changes is that both see the same missed checkpoint at the same time. 

How Can You Tell Whether Your Team Has This Problem? 

Three questions tend to separate the organizations that have solved this from the ones that have not: 

Organizations answering those cleanly usually have one view that several teams open. The ones that can’t usually have a person in the middle. 

Does real-time PO tracking mean replacing our TMS or WMS? 

No. Order-level visibility reads from the systems already in place, which is why these projects tend to be measured in weeks rather than quarters. The retailer above ran a controlled beta first and started without an ERP integration. 

How does PO status tracking work for retail teams running on several systems? 

The order becomes the organizing unit instead of the system. Each milestone attaches to the PO it belongs to, so one record carries the whole sequence and any team can read it. 

Is this only useful for logistics teams? 

No, and the retailers getting the most from it open access widely. In the case above, 71 active users spanned merchandising, supply chain, compliance, finance, receiving, and regional store management, with 41 of 42 lines of business represented. 

What makes one at-risk order more urgent than another? 

Ordering by what's most recent isn't the most helpful approach. A missing ASN on a promotional event carries more exposure than a routine replenishment running a day late, so ordering exceptions by likely revenue impact puts attention where the money is. 

Want To See Which POs Are Already at Risk? 

 gives merchandising, supply chain, finance, and store teams one view of every active PO, with gaps ranked by what they are likely to cost. It reads the TMS, WMS, carrier, and ASN data you already have, so there is no ERP integration to start. 

 publishes practical resources on order visibility, ASN accuracy, and receiving workflows. 

A Realistic Scorecard Timeline for a New Suppliers’ First 6 Months 

For emerging brands, securing a retail partnership is a major milestone. But as shipping begins, excitement is met with a high-stakes reality check: the vendor scorecard. Logging into a portal for the first time can feel like looking at an unintelligible jumble of percentages, acronyms, and penalty notices. 

When early numbers do not align with standard thresholds, it is easy to panic. However, 

 are the foundation for a continuous, data-driven conversation about supply chain execution. Understanding how to read these metrics over time, distinguishing between typical stumbles and chronic issues, and recognizing how major retailers build ramp-up time into their programs is what separates suppliers who scale from those who struggle. 

The Trajectory Mindset vs. The Instant Threshold 

A common mistake is evaluating early scores against mature benchmarks. An established supplier with years of experience maintaining a 96% on-time in-full (OTIF) rate is playing a different game than a brand sitting at 75% in month two. 

Thankfully, retail buyers understand this learning curve and design onboarding frameworks to accommodate the initial transition. A prime example of this ramp-up structure is the new-supplier grace period. Walmart, for example, offers new suppliers a three-month window where OTIF fines are waived while performance is actively tracked. This allows your operations team to troubleshoot electronic data interchange (EDI) connections and carrier handoffs without suffering margin-draining penalty invoices from day one. 

Similarly, large-scale compliance programs often utilize phased rollouts. When Walmart introduced its 

, it did so over a prolonged schedule, starting with purchase order accuracy before introducing barcode, labeling, and packaging phases in later periods. Well-designed programs also leverage initial baseline periods of 60 to 90 days before scoring officially starts to establish mutual accountability. 

When new suppliers review early scorecard failures, they often treat every defect as a physical logistics failure. If a shipment is flagged as late or short, the immediate reaction is to blame the warehouse team or the carrier. Yet, in your first six months, most scorecard errors are actually data setup gaps rather than physical execution failures. 

A digital supply chain operates on parallel tracks: a physical flow of goods and a digital flow of data. Long before a pallet is loaded onto a truck, data must flow seamlessly to the retailer. If item files are misconfigured, EDI mappings are untested, or 

 are mistimed, the physical cargo is doomed to fail compliance checks. 

Item file discrepancies in portals like 

 create a compounding effect downstream. An incorrect carton weight or case pack dimension means automated sorting equipment will flag the delivery as non-compliant. Nailing your item configuration and EDI setups early establishes your baseline. 

This foundational setup has direct financial consequences. For example, when apparel manufacturer 

 managed five separate EDI systems, onboarding a new retailer took up to six months. Consolidating onto a unified network dropped that timeline to six weeks.  

Similarly, national third-party logistics provider 

 reduced testing and go-live cycles from twelve weeks to hours. When operations are streamlined, staff hours saved are substantial. 

 automated retail orders and invoices, saving over 780 hours of manual data entry in its first year while improving order accuracy. Getting your digital infrastructure in place before the first purchase order (PO) arrives ensures early scorecard stability. 

To evaluate your business fairly, look at your trajectory over your first two quarters rather than a single weekly snapshot. 

Your goal in the first 60 days is addressing systemic data gaps and establishing your diagnostic baseline. Typical stumbles include missing 

 windows, such as Ulta's two-business-day timeline, or sending misaligned ASNs. 

Treat these weeks as a diagnostic sandbox. If your OTIF is sitting at 75%, do not panic. Instead, use the scorecard to identify whether the root cause is a recurring carrier delay or an incorrect item record. For distributors like 

, performance represents 25% of your overall grade, with fill rate representing half of that category's weight. Under KeHE's program, new brands are given a full year to align with onboarding expectations. Use this window to refine digital transmissions before penalty fees begin. 

As grace periods wind down, your performance must show upward progress. If your scorecard continues to show flat trends, the retailer will begin to interpret these stumbles as chronic operational limitations. 

Tracing defects back to their origin is key at this stage. For example, 

 should check if their carrier is missing appointments at the distribution center (DC). Conventional supplier appointments require 72 hours' notice, while Natural supplier appointments require 24 hours’ notice. Late arrivals at UNFI carry a $250 fee and cost you your scheduled dock slot, causing further receiving delays.  

, suppliers must maintain a 93% OTIF score to avoid a 15% fine on expected expenses. If you are above 93% but have late orders, you face a $100 fine per late PO. Pinpointing these specific bottlenecks keeps your score climbing. 

It is important to note the necessity of keeping your focus on your compliance score rather than the dollar amount lost to deductions. Having a solid compliance performance score relative to your category competitors can make a big difference when it comes to line-reviews. And ultimately, a better compliance score will correlate to less money lost to deductions. 

By month six, your supply chain should operate with predictable, repeatable habits. Your operations team should no longer be debugging EDI connections; instead, they should be optimizing physical execution. 

 in-club sales, display pallets must be durable and support 1,500 pounds for loads under 750 pounds, or up to 2,500 pounds on the bottom layer for heavier pallets. If you ship to 

, shipments must match ASNs within a strict 1% audit failure threshold to earn a high shipping performance grade and avoid post-audits. Weekly shipments to Kohl's must also be consolidated and sent to a single designated DC to maintain compliance. 

The First Two Quarters: An Operational Self-Check 

To ensure your brand stays on the right trajectory, run this operational self-check each month before sitting down with your buyer: 

Mastering these requirements turns an emerging supplier into a reliable, long-term partner. By establishing clean digital handoffs and utilizing your early quarters to eliminate systemic defects, you protect your hard-earned margins, preserve shelf space, and build a foundation for sustainable growth. 

Simplify Compliance with SPS Commerce Fulfillment 

Managing diverse compliance guidelines, delivery windows, and shifting EDI specifications is complex. 

Articles

SupplierWiki curates detailed articles to help suppliers win at retail.

Prepping for Walmart Audits

Overview

Articles