Ship-From Warehouse Router

The problem this kills

Your orders keep shipping from the wrong warehouse. The system grabs whatever location it saw first, or a planner eyeballs a spreadsheet and picks one by gut. The result: a single order split across three sites when one could have shipped it whole, freight bills inflated by shipping cross-country when stock sat 40 miles away, and backorders created at one location while another is overflowing.

Nobody set out to do this. It happens because deciding the best ship-from warehouse for every order - weighing live stock, distance to the customer, and a pile of business rules - is genuinely hard to do by hand, fast, all day long. So people stop trying and just pick something.

This tool does that thinking for you, every time, and shows its work - then waits for a human to say yes before anything is committed.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Takes an order in (typed, pasted, or imported from a CSV / Google Sheet).
• Looks at live multi-warehouse stock and the ship-to address.
• Recommends the best warehouse - or the best combination of warehouses - to fulfill the order from, deliberately avoiding unnecessary splits and favoring lower freight cost.
• Explains why it picked each source (stock available, distance, which rule applied).
• Puts the recommendation in front of a planner to approve, tweak, or reject - nothing is committed until they do.
• On approval, saves the routing and produces a clean per-warehouse pick CSV in the exact columns your WMS or floor expects.

It uses zip-code distance as a sensible proxy when you don't have a distance API, so you can build the whole thing today without integrating anything.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code), and it builds the tool with you step by step - in plain language, for a non-developer.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a line of code, the agent asks how your fulfillment actually works today - your warehouses and their codes, how your stock list is shaped, your routing rules and priorities, your typical and peak order volumes, and your messy exceptions (hazmat-only sites, will-call, drop-ship SKUs, freight account quirks). Then it reads a short tailored spec back to you and gets your thumbs-up. You get a router built around your network and rules - not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The full discovery interview, with concrete questions tuned to multi-warehouse fulfillment.
• A data model for warehouses, stock, orders, routing rules, and recommendations.
• The recommendation engine: stock checks, distance scoring, split-minimization, and rule precedence.
• The planner approval screen and the audit trail behind it.
• Per-warehouse pick CSV export in your exact columns.
• A "No API yet?" path that runs entirely on a Google Sheet / CSV of stock and rules.
• Copy-paste prompts for every step.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy that emails suggestions. It's built like an internal system from the first prompt:

• Login so only your team can open it.
• Row-level security so a user only ever sees their own organization's orders and warehouses.
• A human-in-the-loop approval gate - the AI drafts the routing, a planner reviews and approves, and only then is the allocation committed. The machine never commits on its own.
• A complete audit trail - who recommended what, who approved it, what changed, and when.
• Duplicate guards keyed on order ID so the same order can never be routed and committed twice.

Who it's for

Fulfillment planners and operations managers running more than one shipping location who are tired of split shipments, surprise freight bills, and orders leaving from the wrong site. If you can describe your warehouses and your routing rules in plain English, you can build this.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor it to your network.