Five order sheets, one truck day: running multi-supplier delivery weeks

Nobody designs their delivery week; they inherit it. The broadline truck has always come Wednesday. The chip rep comes Monday and Thursday. The beverage route shows up "usually Tuesday." The dairy drop is dawn on Friday. Add a cash-and-carry run when something runs out, and an ordinary store is running five ordering calendars at once — each with its own cutoff, minimum, and order sheet. The store didn’t choose this system. The suppliers’ routing software did.

The real cost is the cutoffs

Every delivery day has a shadow: the cutoff, usually one or two days earlier, when the order must be in. Five delivery days means five cutoffs scattered across the week, and missing one doesn’t mean no delivery — it means an emergency: a cash-and-carry run at retail-ish prices, a shelf gap until the next truck, or a rushed phone order placed from memory. Most of the "we ran out" moments in a small store trace back not to demand surprises but to a cutoff that slid past while the owner was doing one of the other four jobs.

Map the week once

The single highest-value exercise is embarrassingly simple: write the grid. One row per supplier; columns for order day, cutoff time, delivery day, minimum, and how the order is placed (rep, portal, phone). Tape it where orders happen. Two things jump out of almost every store’s grid the first time it’s written down:

• Clustered cutoffs. Three suppliers all wanting orders Monday afternoon explains why Mondays feel like a wall — and why the Monday orders are the sloppiest ones.
• Orphan days. A delivery landing Friday at 6am with nobody scheduled to check it in is how shorts go unclaimed and invoices go straight to the drawer.

Once the grid exists you can negotiate with it. Reps have more schedule flexibility than they volunteer; asking to move an order day to decongest your Monday costs nothing. And staffing the week around known delivery windows — so every truck is met by someone who checks the delivery against the order — is the cheapest shrink reduction available.

One sheet per supplier, built from sell-through

The clipboard order sheet fails at exactly this scale. With one supplier it’s manageable; with five, the sheets fragment — one lives on the clipboard, one in the rep’s head, one is a portal favorites list, and two are "walk the store and look." The fix is boring consistency: every supplier gets a standing order sheet, organized in the order you walk the store, with par quantities based on how fast items actually sell between that supplier’s deliveries. A weekly item on a Wednesday truck needs a week of cover plus a margin; the same item on a twice-weekly route needs half that. Pars set by gut consistently over-order slow movers and under-order the stuff that embarrasses you.

The pile-up question: who gets the order?

Multi-supplier weeks create a quiet pricing problem: overlapping catalogs. The broadliner, the beverage route, and the cash-and-carry all sell the same energy drink, and whichever cutoff happens to be nearest tends to win the order — convenience buying, not price buying. Over a year, "whoever’s truck comes next" is an expensive purchasing strategy. The discipline is to decide the supplier per item deliberately, on unit price, a few times a year — and then let the order sheets encode the decision, so Tuesday-you doesn’t re-litigate it under time pressure.

What this looks like with software underneath

Everything above works on paper. What software adds is that the grid, the sheets, and the supplier-per-item decisions stop being maintenance: in StoreQueue, each supplier’s catalog, minimums, and order days live in one app, order sheets build themselves from sell-through, one cart splits into the right order for each distributor, and every delivery lands on one timeline so the Friday-dawn drop doesn’t depend on someone remembering it’s Friday. The week still belongs to five trucks — but the ordering stops being five jobs.

Start with the grid this week. It costs one sheet of paper, and it’s the map every other improvement hangs on.