How to Automate commonsku

commonsku holds the order from presentation to in-hands date

commonsku is order management software for promotional products distributors, the businesses that sell branded hoodies, drinkware, notebooks and trade show giveaways to companies that want a logo on something.

A distributor makes nothing. It sells a supplier's product, has a decorator put an imprint on it, and gets the result to a client by a date somebody promised in a meeting. The whole job is coordination: a presentation of options, a client picking one, artwork approved, a purchase order to a supplier, a proof signed, freight booked, and a box on a desk the morning of the event.

commonsku is where that lives. Presentations go out from it, orders and purchase orders sit in it, the CRM holds the client, and the Production Report shows every open job and the stage it has reached. A distributor with ten people running fifty live orders has one place to look instead of ten inboxes.

The in-hands date depends on people who do not use your software

An in-hands date is a promise about somebody else's warehouse, somebody else's press and somebody else's truck.

So the week fills up with checking. Is the navy quarter-zip still there in XL, or did it go short since the presentation went out. Did the supplier acknowledge the purchase order. Has the decorator sent the proof, and did the client ever look at it. Where is the shipment now, and will it clear the depot before Friday. A rush order for an event on the fifteenth means somebody refreshing a tracking page between calls.

Then the second layer. A client's company store whose stock levels need watching. An accounts payable portal that has to be opened to find out whether an invoice was scheduled for payment.

None of it is selling. All of it is one person keeping a promise on behalf of six companies at once.

commonsku

Stock confirmed before the client is told The exact colour and size on every open order checked on the supplier's own site, while a substitution is still an easy conversation.

In-hands dates that defend themselves Freight tracked for each purchase order, so a shipment that stopped moving is on a list days before the event it was booked for.

Quiet approvals surfaced Proofs nobody signed and presentations nobody opened, gathered each morning with how long each has been waiting.

Connected suppliers already take the retyping out of a purchase order

commonsku does a great deal of this without being asked, and a distributor who has not switched it all on is paying for the capability twice.

Connected Suppliers send electronic purchase orders straight into a supplier's own system, so a purchase order stops being an email somebody has to acknowledge. PromoStandards brings inventory, shipment details and pricing from participating suppliers into the order without a separate login. Presentations, Shops and Client Portals give the client somewhere to choose, approve and reorder, removing a long email chain from every job. The Production Dashboard and Production Report put every live order on one screen, sorted the way the person looking at it wants, and Reports and Analytics cover margin, sales and commission.

That is a serious share of the job, and the connected supplier list keeps growing.

The limit is written into the word connected. Electronic purchase orders and PromoStandards reach the suppliers who have implemented them. Plenty have not, and almost every local decorator and screen printer is outside it entirely, along with every freight carrier, every client procurement portal and every company store a client asked you to run.

An order book that checks its own supply chain

The Production Report lists what you know. What is actually true is on the supplier sites, the freight trackers and the client portals the office already has passwords for.

Stock checked on a supplier's own site for the exact colour and size on an open order, before the client is told it is fine. Freight tracked for every shipped purchase order, with anything that has stopped moving pushed to the top of the morning list, because an in-hands date fails only once and it fails loudly.

A decorator's proof chased wherever it lives, so the job waiting on a signature is named rather than remembered. Supplier promotions read as they are posted and set against quotes still open, so the deal you could have used is not found after the order ships. A client's company store checked for the items running low, with a replenishment order drafted against the program.

Invoices matched to a client's accounts payable portal, so you know which were actually scheduled for payment rather than which you sent.

Anything a client will read gets prepared first and sent by a person. A distributor's business is the relationship.

The unconnected supplier is still a browser away

Every one of those answers is already on a screen somebody in the office can reach. The only question is whether reaching it has to cost a person their afternoon.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the supplier's site, the carrier's tracking page, the decorator's portal or your client's store, reads what is there, and either updates the order in commonsku or hands you the list.

Nothing has to be integrated first, which matters in a trade where plenty of suppliers and nearly every local decorator have no connection at all. It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, you can watch a run and stop it, and anything that reaches a client waits for you.

The workflows below are already built, and each names the sites it opens.