How One Retailer Recovered $38M in Lost Retail by Putting Every Team on the Same View
A specialty retailer pulled purchase order data from its TMS, WMS, and carrier systems into one view with SPS Commerce Visibility Management. Buyers, supply chain, finance, and store teams each see what they need: where inventory is, what is at risk, and what to do about it.
The challenge:
Buyers, logistics, and store teams had no shared source of truth for PO status. Manual lookups across TMS, WMS, and carrier sites burned hours on questions that should have taken seconds.
The solution:
SPS Commerce Visibility Management, connecting TMS, WMS, carrier, ASN, and PO data in one view the whole organization can open.
The result:
$38.2M in lost retail recovered over three years. Five functional teams and 71 active users now work from one unified view, with high-adoption categories running a 10.6-point fill rate advantage over the rest of the organization.
$38.2M
Lost retail recovered, 2023–2025
+10.6pp
Fill rate advantage for high-adoption teams
$170K
Annual productivity value recaptured
The challenge
This specialty retailer runs stores across a tangle of domestic, OCONUS, and international locations, so knowing where a purchase order is at any moment matters. Before Visibility Management, that information sat in pieces across systems that did not talk to each other. Putting the picture together was a person’s job, not the software’s.
A buyer needed to know where a PO was to manage open-to-buy, cancel a late order, or get ready for a vendor conversation. Finding out meant logging into a TMS and WMS they were never trained on, calling logistics, emailing the vendor for a tracking number, and then checking the carrier site by hand. That is a lot of work for a question that should take seconds.
Logistics and supply chain had the mirror image of that problem. A good chunk of their day went to answering questions from buyers, stores, and DC staff who could not see things for themselves. Every one of those answers meant pulling data from a few systems to find something the asker could have found on their own.
Stores felt it most. Associates knew their delivery rhythm, three trucks a week or five, but had no idea what was on them until the doors opened. For advertised events and seasonal promotions, that blind spot turned into real money on the line.
“They had some tools at their disposal. But a lot of times they were going to the vendor asking for tracking information, then manually going to UPS or whatever to figure out where the goods were. It was multiple stakeholders they’d have to go through.”
– Head of Supply Chain, Compliance and Vendor Operations
The solution
The retailer brought in SPS Commerce Visibility Management to put all of that activity in one place. It pulls TMS data, WMS data, carrier tracking, ASN records, and PO status into a single view that any department can open. Because the retailer already runs other SPS tools to onboard suppliers and track how they perform, that supplier and performance data flows into the same view without extra work.
A buyer does not have to learn a system built for logistics. They open Visibility Management, search for open POs against a given vendor, and see what they need. No TMS login, no training on a tool that was never meant for them.
Key capabilities deployed:
- Unified PO timeline: Every milestone from creation to DC receipt to store delivery, with carrier check-in data embedded directly in the view.
- Connected data: TMS, WMS, supplier performance, and ASN data pulled into one interface, including vendor-paid shipments not captured in the TMS.
- Flexible search: By vendor, category, purchase order, LP number, or tracking number, supporting exception management and payment dispute research.
- Access by role: Across merchandising, supply chain, compliance, finance, DC staff, and regional store management.
“We’re not logging into different systems. It’s bringing in that WMS data, that TMS data, the traversal data, the PO data into one spot.”
– Head of Supply Chain, Compliance and Vendor Operations
They rolled it out through a controlled beta first, to get the data right before opening it up. A small group worked with it until they trusted what they were seeing, then it went wide. The beta did not need an ERP integration to start, and buyer access was provided directly without IT involvement.
“We wanted to make sure the data was clean and functioning. The last thing we wanted was for them to not trust it.”
– Head of Supply Chain, Compliance and Vendor Operations
The results
Visibility Management started with the supply chain team and spread from there. Today 71 active users span the organization, and 41 of 42 lines of business have at least one person in the tool. Buying, logistics, finance, and store operations all use it differently, but the pattern holds across every team: people who used to spend their day chasing answers now spend it acting on them. The categories that leaned in hardest run a 94.1 percent fill rate, more than ten points ahead of the rest of the business.
Merchandising and Buying
Buyers can now check open POs without logging into the TMS or WMS. They search by vendor, category, or item and see what is in transit, what has gone quiet, and what to cancel before it eats into open-to-buy. Work that used to mean calls to logistics, the vendor, and the carrier now takes one search. The numbers back it up: the categories where buyers use the tool most run a 94.1 percent fill rate against 87.6 percent everywhere else, and lost retail in those categories dropped 27 percent over three years. Ahead of a big ad event, that head start is the difference between catching a problem and marking down what arrives late.
The clearest proof shows up on the shelf. Comparing two fast-moving consumables categories item by item across a year, the one with the higher fill rate and heavier Visibility Management use ran far fewer empty shelves. The lower-fill category had 65 percent more of its active items go out of stock during their selling window, and the lost retail that came with those gaps was more than three times larger. An order-to-receipt number that looks like a logistics metric turns out to decide what a shopper finds in stock.
“Visibility gives you that early warning. You’ve got the risk of missing the sale entirely — or getting it late and having to mark it down at the end of the season. Either way, it’s a margin problem. And it’s one you could have seen coming.”
– Head of Supply Chain, Compliance and Vendor Operations
| Higher fill rate, heavier adoption 93.3% fill rate |
Lower fill rate, lighter adoption 65.8% fill rate |
|---|---|
|
11.4%
of active items went out of stock (167 of 1,464 SKUs) |
18.8%
of active items went out of stock (1,214 of 6,447 SKUs) |
| Roughly $64K in estimated lost retail | Roughly $204K in estimated lost retail |
Visibility gives you that early warning. You’ve got the risk of missing the sale entirely — or getting it late and having to mark it down at the end of the season. Either way, it’s a margin problem. And it’s one you could have seen coming.
– Head of Supply Chain, Compliance and Vendor Operations
Supply Chain and Logistics
The supply chain team used to be the help desk. Buyers and stores would ask where something was, and someone had to go dig it out of three systems to answer. That job is mostly gone. Cutting those lookups is worth an estimated $170,000 a year in recovered time across active users, and the five-person supply chain compliance team accounts for $28,420 of it on its own. The bigger win is timing. Catch a routing gap early and you can work a standard-cost fix with the vendor. Catch it late and you are paying for expedited freight. Seeing at-risk POs two to three weeks sooner lets the team move shipments from air to ocean, worth about $96,000 a year in freight they no longer have to rush.
Finance and Accounts Payable
One person in finance uses Visibility Management to work payment disputes, reconciling what the ASN said against what actually shipped. That used to mean pulling records from several systems and chasing down a few people to piece the story together. Now it is one screen, following a PO from creation through DC receipt to store check-in.
Distribution Center Staff
DC staff check incoming shipments against ASN data to catch rogue cartons, including vendor-paid shipments the TMS never saw. They adopted it for a simple reason: it is easier to use than the old TMS tools.
Regional Store Operations
District liaisons use it to plan staffing around incoming freight volume. Next on the list: giving store associates a way to look up which truck a specific replenishment item is on and when it lands.
“Now it’s at their fingertips, it’s updated regularly, they can count on the information, and they don’t have to wait for someone to get back to them.”
– Head of Supply Chain, Compliance and Vendor Operations
Part of a Connected System
Visibility Management is the view this story runs on, but it is not working alone. It sits on top of the same SPS Network the retailer already uses to bring suppliers on and to track how they perform. Relationship Management onboards partners and keeps the supplier and item data clean. Performance Management scores how those suppliers actually execute. Visibility Management pulls both of those data sets, plus the live PO and ASN flow, into the single view every team works from. Each piece is more useful because the others are feeding it.
Connect
Relationship Management
Onboards suppliers and keeps supplier and item data clean across the network.
The View Across it All
Visibility Management
Pulls supplier, performance, PO, and ASN data into one view every team works from. The $38.2M story lives here.
Optimize
Performance Management
Scorecards that track how suppliers execute, feeding performance signals back into the view.
Results at a Glance
| Value Driver | Impact | What Drove It |
|---|---|---|
| Lost retail recovered | $38.2M (2023–2025) | Ordered-to-received gap narrowed as fill rates and tool usage climbed together across categories |
| Fill rate advantage | +10.6 points | High-adoption categories at 94.1% vs 87.6% across the rest of the organization |
| Time recapture | $170K / year | Productivity reclaimed across 22 active users by replacing multi-system lookups |
| Emergency freight avoided | $96K / year | Catching at-risk POs early enough to shift shipments from air to ocean |
| Cross-functional adoption | 71 users, 41 of 42 LOBs | Five functional teams on one view, scaling toward ~100 users at full rollout |
Why It Matters
When a high-priority ad item misses its routing window, the cost does not stop at the lost sale. It compounds: expedited freight to recover the shipment, a vendor conversation that should have happened a week earlier, and a markdown on whatever did arrive at the end of the promotional period. Each of those costs was avoidable if someone had seen the routing gap in time to act.
That is the core financial case for unified visibility. Not operational efficiency as an abstract goal, but the specific dollars that leave the business when the right person does not have the right information early enough to change the outcome.
SPS Commerce orchestrates data, decisions, and relationships across the supply chain so teams stop chasing answers and start making informed moves. Visibility tools built for logistics professionals rarely reach the buyers managing open-to-buy, the regional managers planning for ad events, or the finance staff resolving vendor disputes. Each of those roles carries real financial exposure when data stays locked in systems they cannot access.
“Where would higher supply chain visibility provide the most value? Reduced supply chain risk and reduced opportunity cost.”
– Merchandising Leader, Internal Survey Response
What’s Next
With full production rollout underway and approximately 100 users expected across all functional teams, the organization is focused on two near-term capabilities that extend the value Visibility already delivers. Exception-based alerting will surface routing and shipment issues automatically, pushing configurable thresholds to the right users before problems require manual discovery. Item-level store lookup will give associates visibility into which specific replenishment items will arrive on which delivery, replacing the guesswork that currently follows every inbound truck.
See what cross-functional visibility looks like for your team.
Contact SPS Commerce to learn how Visibility connects supply chain data across every team.
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