A Master Class in Optimizing Supply Chain Operations

The challenge

When Devendra Samdani joined as Head of IT, the company had exactly one retail customer: QVC. And a team of 15 people to serve it manually.

Every inbound order had to be downloaded, entered into their system, acknowledged, and tracked. Every invoice had to be generated and submitted on time, because late invoices meant penalties, and sometimes rejection. Inventory feeds went out by hand. Shipping labels were printed one at a time. At around 100 orders a day, the team was already stretched.

“There were chances of errors, which we were actually making on a regular basis. And obviously, making errors and getting penalized puts the brakes on your future growth.”
— Devendra Samdani, Head of IT, Ultimate Trading International

He was brought in to fix that. What followed was a full rethinking of how a fast-growing supplier could build operational infrastructure that could scale — and a hard lesson about what happens when you choose the wrong partner to get there.

The solution

Before evaluating any technology, Devendra and his team defined what they actually needed: reduce operation time, eliminate manual errors, ensure on-time document submission, and send accurate inventory to customers so orders didn’t get skipped or cancelled.

Those four objectives became the lens through which every decision was made. When Ultimate Trading first connected to the SPS network, orders that had previously required constant manual handling began flowing automatically. Compliance improved. Penalties dropped. The error rate that had been a recurring cost became manageable. Team members were redeployed to high-value work in other parts of the organization.

The Detour That Proved the Partnership

A competitor came in with a lower price. The pitch was straightforward: full NetSuite integration, faster implementation, less cost. Ultimate Trading made the switch.

Six months later, the competitor had partially onboarded one customer. Inventory integration was incomplete. The shipping label capability that was part of the original promise didn’t exist — and when asked about it, the vendor proposed a separate contract with a third-party provider. When the agreed implementation window ended, the billing shifted to hourly for work that was still in progress.

When it became clear the situation wasn’t going to resolve, Ultimate Trading contacted SPS. By the end of the same day, the company was back online and operational.

“In my 21 years of working, I have never seen an IT company react with such speed and care. That’s what built our confidence.”
— Devendra Samdani, Head of IT, Ultimate Trading International

The experience reframed what the partnership meant. It also set the stage for something more ambitious.

When Ultimate Trading re-engaged SPS, the conversation quickly moved beyond restoring the status quo. The team mapped out a direct, bidirectional NetSuite integration covering all seven of their retail customers: orders, inventory, acknowledgements, and shipping, all flowing through NetSuite without manual intervention.

This was the scope the competitor had spent six months failing to complete. SPS delivered it in eight weeks. Ultimate Trading went live on January 7, 2026, fifteen days ahead of schedule.

“The most important thing was sending correct inventory to the customer so they make accurate orders. SPS helped us map the entire picture we had in our mind.”
— Devendra Samdani, Head of IT, Ultimate Trading International

The results

Today, the company processes an average of 500 to 700 orders daily, with peaks on major gifting days reaching more than 3,000 orders. The 15-person data operations team that once handled 100 orders a day manually now runs with three people.

Advice from the Inside

Devendra’s team approached adoption with rigor that drove results.

They didn’t wait for documentation to be handed to them. After training, the team printed workflow guides for every task and posted them at workstations. Because Devendra understood that automation only holds if the people around it know exactly what to do when the system hands something off to them.

He also draws a clear line between the speed a competitor promises and the kind of scalability a long-term partner actually delivers.

“Experience counts. SPS has been in this business 25-plus years. 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.”
— Devendra Samdani, Head of IT, Ultimate Trading International

The distinction matters for any operations leader evaluating suppliers on price alone. Saving money should not come at the cost of business continuity. The cheaper option that fails mid-implementation is not, in the end, the cheaper option.

Devendra offers three things to operations leaders attempting the same kind of transition:

1. Be honest about your internal readiness. Know what your team can absorb, and build adoption into the plan rather than assuming it will follow from training alone.
2. Choose partners based on what they can demonstrate, not what they can promise. Ask for references from companies at a similar scale. Ask about what happens when something goes wrong, because something always does.
3. Make your team the center of adoption. The system handles the transaction. Your people handle the judgment calls at the edges. If they understand the workflow, you have a resilient operation. If they don’t, you have a system that breaks every time something unexpected happens.

What Comes Next

Ultimate Trading is actively exploring AI for automated reporting and order tracking. Their NetSuite environment, now fully integrated through SPS, gives them a clean data foundation to build on.

Devendra is clear about where he’ll turn as supply chain and AI begin to converge in his operations. The trajectory from here looks less like a technology project and more like a compounding system: orders come in, NetSuite moves them, SPS keeps the data clean and compliant, and AI will continue to optimize from there.

For a supplier that started with one retail customer and a team of 15 people doing everything by hand, that’s not a small distance to have traveled.