Drop-ship from Vollrath, Cambro, Vulcan, Rational, Hobart, San Jamar, how does it actually work?

Drop-ship is how mid-market foodservice distributors compete with WebstaurantStore without holding inventory. The architecture:

• Inventory feeds, each manufacturer pushes a daily or hourly inventory file. EDI 846 (Inventory Inquiry) is the standard; SFTP CSV is the fallback. Magento ingests, updates stock-status table, hides out-of-stock SKUs from layered nav.
• Order routing, on order placement, custom drop-ship router module splits line items by manufacturer. Vollrath line → routed to Vollrath. Vulcan range → routed to Vulcan. San Jamar dispensers → routed to San Jamar.
• PO emission, EDI 850 (Purchase Order) per manufacturer, or REST API call if they expose one. Modern manufacturers (San Jamar, Cambro) prefer API; old-school (Vulcan, Hobart) still run EDI through Sterling B2B or OpenText.
• ASN + invoice ingest, EDI 856 (ASN) when they ship → customer order status flips to “shipped” with tracking. EDI 810 (invoice) hits your AP for monthly reconciliation.
• Drop-ship orchestration platforms, instead of building EDI from scratch, use LogicBroker, Convictional, SPS Commerce, or Inovis (OpenText). Pricing: $500, $3,500/mo + per-doc fees. Connects to 5,000+ manufacturers out of the box.

Customer sees one order, one tracking page, one invoice, even when 4 line items split-ship from 4 vendors. That’s the magic. The hard part is keeping inventory feeds accurate so you don’t oversell. Daily reconciliation is the operational discipline that separates the distributors that scale from the ones that get crushed by chargebacks.