Mile Marker Restores Inventory Visibility on $2M in Revenue with SPS Fulfillment

The Challenge

When Justin Moore stepped in as CEO of Mile Marker in 2023, he inherited a 40-year legacy and a company that had seen little structural or operational change in about 20 years. For the first 18 months as CEO, he watched how work actually moved through the organization. One of the things he noticed was a highly manual copy-and-paste shipping workflow.

Teams had to hop between systems to manage order-to-invoice end to end. They fulfilled each order in NetSuite, then re-entered the same data in SPS Fulfillment, following a different set of rules for every retailer. One team member spent hours every day making sure inventory files were sent and received correctly, and errors still turned up. The order queue showed how far the manual work had drifted from what the team believed was automated.

“We had over 900 open orders backed up, and we assumed steps like order acknowledgments were automated. They weren’t.”
— Justin Moore, CEO, Mile Marker

New products and new retail accounts meant more orders to process. A lack of visibility into store-level sales data and inventory for several retailers caused blind spots in what was selling and what each retailer had on hand.

Mile Marker had originally set up each color winch combination as its own SKU, which grew the list to roughly 36,000 items. The long list made inventory updates harder to keep accurate, and slashes and dashes in part numbers complicated processing with several retailers.

At a large retailer, items with cross-references were not showing as available inventory. The cross-references did not match the retailer’s part number requirements, and item numbers used special characters that retailer’s system did not support. Some item numbers exceeded the retailer’s character limit. Items missing from the inventory file were delisted from the retailer’s website, and sales were at a standstill until the data feed was fixed. Justin calculated the gap at roughly $2 million in missed revenue.

For a team supporting more than 50 retail trading partners, every manual step multiplied with each retailer added, and orders stacked up faster than the team could key them. To keep growing, Mile Marker needed each order entered into NetSuite once and carried to the retailer without anyone keying it again.

The Solution

Mile Marker worked with SPS to streamline its supply chain operations by automating manual workflows and began onboarding NetSuite automation with SPS. Purchase orders, shipment notices, and invoices move between trading partners and NetSuite without anyone keying them twice. SPS adjusts the connection as NetSuite web services and customer requirements change. Justin describes what that means for his team:

“Our team works in NetSuite. SPS carries the data to the retailer and keeps the connection current for us.”
— Justin Moore, CEO, Mile Marker

SPS Decision Intelligence gives Mile Marker’s team retailer sales and inventory data to use alongside NetSuite data, so planning starts from what is selling, not just what shipped. This helped close visibility gaps around what retailers had on hand, supporting more informed assortment and replenishment decisions across key retail accounts.

SPS worked with Mile Marker to clear a large retailer inventory visibility gap. The teams reworked cross-reference setups and resolved non-numeric characters in item numbers that were holding back inventory visibility. Across every account, the goal is now a fully automated NetSuite workflow in place of copy-and-paste shipping.

The Results

Purchase orders, shipment notices, and invoices now run automatically between Mile Marker and many of its trading partners. Without the automation, Justin estimates Mile Marker would have needed to add another full-time employee.

Mile Marker trimmed its SKU list by more than 98%, from roughly 36,000 items to under 1,000, so the inventory feeds it sends retailers start from a leaner base. The team retests each retailer’s inventory file as it comes onto the connection. That testing with SPS showed where product data was missing. One retailer had only 120 of the 458 SKUs set up, and another had only 46. Those gaps gave Mile Marker a clear reason to talk with retailers about adding more of the line.

An accounting lead first spotted the large retailer revenue visibility gap when items with cross-references were missing from the retailer’s list of available inventory. Once the cross-references matched the retailers requirements, those items were visible again, and sales recovered. Justin explains what that was worth:

“Fixing one cross-reference gap made roughly $2 million of our products visible to the retailer’s buyers again.”
— Justin Moore, CEO, Mile Marker

Lessons Learned

Justin Moore stepped into a 40-year-old brand and learned a few lessons worth passing on to other leaders scaling a legacy business.

1. Watch first, then speed up. “I would tell them to monitor the business for a period of time, but then expedite.” Observation can’t become indefinite, and clear patterns call for decisive moves.
2. Ask why before you change a process. Understand how teams do their work and which tools they use, then decide what to improve. Technology for its own sake adds sprawl.
3. Track the work, then match people to roles. Once projects were documented, it was clear who was pushing the business forward and who needed more support with new ways of working.

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