We are looking to implement Drop Ship Purchase Orders but found that NetSuite only supports a single "default" vendor for each item. It appears that if that item is ordered, the PO would go directly to that vendor. But we have multiple vendors that create the same item for us and would like the PO to go to the vendor that is geographically closest to the customer destination to save on costs. Does anyone know of a way to distribute the PO in this manner?

We do something a bit similar, though we actually split (percentage wise) across multiple vendors (we are selling insurance, a single coverage / item is sometimes split across multiple insurer contracts). What we do is add a placeholder item on the SO for each additional vendor (to force another purchase order to be created when the sales order is approved), then we have a suitescript tool to populate the “extra” POs by copying over the lines from the “primary” PO.

This would probably be a pretty intense script to write - but I don't see a reason it couldn't be figured out. The biggest challenge I'm unsure of will be figuring out closest geography to a customer destination. - might be better to make a record for controlling the assignment based on zip codes - would require maintenance on, but wouldn't require logic to determine distance High level what I'd do is: Create a "Fake" vendor. Have that assigned as default for all your items that you want to do this with. run a map/reduce every 15 minutes. Map Reduce Looks at Zip/ item and updates vendor on the PO appropriately.