The Problem
Imagine: You order ten items from a company. Wait the standard 5-10 business days for processing, and finally. The shipment arrives. You open the box, and suddlenly you’re confused—only eight are inside. Two are missing.
No explanation. No notification. No timeline. No communication.
Now you're playing detective. “Was it a mistake?” “Are the remaining items still coming?” “Do I need to contact someone?” “Should I reorder them? Are they even still available?”
Not the customer experience anyone is hoping for.
For a recent client in the B2B flavor manufacturing business, partial shipments were a normal reality of manufacturing and fulfillment, where sometimes inventory timing, production schedules, or operational constraints meant that part of an order shipped while remaining items followed later.
This meant that above all else, timely, accurate communication was crucial to doing business.
The Challenge
Historically, ensuring customers understood what had shipped versus what remained outstanding required manual effort:
- Step 1: Review the shipment
- Step 2: Identify unfulfilled items
- Step 3: Generate updated documentation
- Step 4: Send the email
And because partial shipments often happened during busy fulfillment periods, these communications competed with dozens of other priorities for attention, creating a human bandwidth problem that oftentimes looked like lazy neglect to the customer.
Anchor Group partnered with this client to eliminate that bottleneck through automation.
The Solution
The NetSuite automated backorder notifications solution that we built monitored sales orders as fulfillment activity occurred.
When an order transitioned into a partially fulfilled state and items remained outstanding, NetSuite automatically generated a back order notification.
Customers received communication explaining that part of their order had shipped while other items remained open.
The automation also generated a specialized back order confirmation document showing only the items still awaiting fulfillment.
Instead of forcing customers to compare invoices, packing slips, and order confirmations to understand what remained outstanding, the information was delivered directly and clearly.
As with many seemingly simple automations, the complexity lived beneath the surface.
Through conversations and process mapping with the client, we identified that the system needed to correctly identify partial fulfillment scenarios. It also needed to distinguish between fully shipped orders and partially shipped orders.
What’s more, is from a customer experience aspect, it needed to ensure notifications weren't sent multiple times.
To avoid duplicate products sent (or the inverse of none at all), this new NetSuite automation needed to dynamically generate documentation based on the remaining open items.
And finally, it needed to support both English and French communication requirements, and identify which communications were required for each order.
Working alongside the client's IT and Customer Success teams, Anchor Group carefully tested fulfillment scenarios, status transitions, and edge cases to ensure customers received accurate information every time.
The Results
Once deployed, the impact extended well beyond time savings:
Customers gained visibility and important insight into their operations timelines; customer service teams fielded fewer clarification requests or confused calls about orders; sales reps stayed informed without needing to manually coordinate updates and had all the information they needed at their fingertips during conversations with customers.
Fulfillment teams spent less time explaining what happened after shipments had already left the building, and—most importantly—customers stopped having to guess. Which brough the client much more repeat business and new, happier, customers in the end.
When a customer receives only part of what they expected, uncertainty is often more frustrating than the delay itself.
An automated workflow for backorder notifications eliminated both.
Thank you for reading Case Study #6: Automated Back Order Notifications
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