Fulfillment Turnaround: 46% to 62% Profitability

The Problem

A payments hardware company ran fulfillment across three countries — the USA, Australia, and Singapore — through four systems that each told a different story: NetSuite, Salesforce, BigCommerce, ShipHero. Orders moved. Margin didn’t. Profitability sat at 46% and nobody could point to the leak.

The instinct was to look at the big line items: shipping rates, vendor costs. The usual suspects.

The Diagnosis

I spent over a decade as a bodyworker before operations, and the discipline transfers directly: the symptom you can see is never the root cause. The shoulder that hurts is rarely the shoulder that’s broken.

So instead of starting from the cost report, I traced the order flow end to end. The margin wasn’t leaking at any one step. It was leaking between steps:

• Customs paperwork was assembled by hand, order by order. HTS codes were inconsistent, so shipments stalled at borders — and every stalled shipment compounded into expedite fees, support time, and unhappy customers.
• The four systems never agreed on order state, so the team reconciled by hand, and reconciliation errors became reshipments.
• Fulfillment protocols varied by person. Cycle counts drifted. Vendor coordination ran on memory.

No single broken part. A chain of unguarded handoffs.

The Build

Three months, repairing the chain in order of damage:

1. Automated the customs layer. Standardized HTS code assignment and auto-generated commercial invoices and bills of lading. Roughly 90% of customs-clearance delays disappeared — and with them the expedite-fee bleed.
2. Standardized fulfillment protocols and cycle counts, so order state stopped depending on who touched it.
3. Put the cross-border team on Kanban, making the work-in-progress visible across all three countries instead of trapped in inboxes.

The Outcome

Profitability moved from 46% to 62% in three months. Not by squeezing any single cost — by repairing the connections where the margin was quietly draining.

That’s the pattern I keep finding: the fix is rarely where the pain is reported. You trace it back.