API Tire sells tires to its Customers through both Full Truckload and Less than Full Truckload (LTL). A digital modernization of the warehouse turns a manual, paper-and-email operation into a connected, real-time system that keeps every order, shipment, and tire accounted for.
Forging Operational Clarity
API Tire built its business on tires — moving them by the truckload to dealers across the country. But the systems behind that business were running on manual effort: orders typed into the ERP by hand, warehouse locations tracked on paper or by human knowledge, and customer questions were answered one email and phone call at a time. As order volume and complexity grew, the operation needed a digital foundation that could keep pace.
The Challenge
In a business where a single customer might place several small orders that accumulate into a full truckload, visibility and accuracy are everything. API Tire’s existing systems, while functional, weren’t built for that level of coordination.
Key challenges included:
- Replacing a manual, human-driven process for tracking tire locations and inventory
- Managing complex order flows – Factor Direct and Warehouse – each with their own rules, pricing, and product visibility
- Building software infrastructure capable of supporting more than 20 unique integration touchpoints – something API Tire had no existing tool to do
“We were running a modern-scale tire operation on a human-driven process. Locations, inventory, and order tracking all depended on people remembering and re-keying. We needed a partner who could digitize the warehouse without disrupting the business.”
— API Tire Project Leadership
Operations, Coordination & Execution
Our approach centered on a focused, warehouse-first digital transformation: deploy a modern Warehouse Management System, connect it tightly to API Tire’s existing ERP, and automate the manual work that was slowing the team down. This was as much a program-management challenge as a technical one. Weidenhammer orchestrated multiple vendors and agencies toward a single delivery, the Warehouse Management Software provider for the WMS, a third-party developer for the ERP integration, and Weidenhammer driving project management while contributing its own internal development team.
Coordinating these moving parts — across vendor developers, internal Weidenhammer developers, and the physical-setup partners outfitting the facilities — is what delivered a system built for real-world warehouse operations.
Modernizing the Warehouse
We replaced paper-and-memory processes with the Warehouse Management System, deployed across the operation’s facilities. The Texas Warehouse presented a particular coordination challenge: a single location that was physically two separate warehouses — Warehouse A (957) and Warehouse B (937).
Standing up the warehouses meant managing a web of dependencies in parallel: coordinating multiple physical-setup vendors for RF and scanning hardware, wireless networking, and aisle signage; aligning developers across multiple agencies — the Warehouse Management Software provider and a third-party developer — with internal Weidenhammer developers; and keeping the dual-warehouse Texas rollout (957 and 937) synchronized with the Scottsdale deployment so that no facility moved ahead of the integration work supporting it.
Core capabilities delivered:
- ASN receipt and directed put-away rules
- Inventory and location management
- Count checks and cycle counts
- Order picking and job assignment
- Load management for shipments, cancellations, and short-shipping
- Full audit and tracking of picking, loading, and shipping activity
The platform was customized specifically for API Tire: a dashboard organizing orders by Customer ID and Ship-To Location; the ability to combine multiple sales orders and plan multi-stop shipments with real-time weight and load calculations; and virtual warehouses to manage public and private inventory pools.
Connecting the Systems
The heart of the engagement was a custom integration layer connecting API Tire’s ERP to the WMS, handling both inbound and outbound flows across more than 20 touchpoints.
- Orders can be staged in the ERP without releasing them to the warehouse — nothing can be seen, picked, or shipped until it has been sent from the ERP system to the Warehouse Operations Team. To handle the overall new process, new WMS Order statuses were created to track the Order Fulfillment process in the ERP.
- These new “WMS Statuses” in the ERP were very important as there needed to be guards in place to prevent Customer Service from editing Orders once they had been sent to the WMS team for Order Picking. Order status process of flow of “Approve and Send to WMS” to “Update” once transmitted, then a WMS status is “Released” once the warehouse team begun it’s picking. When an Order was eventually shipped to the Customer a final status of “Shipped” would be populated into the ERP system.
- A single push mechanism handles both inbound (purchase orders) and outbound (sales orders) flows.
- We adopted a real-time inventory approach over batch syncing — with so many moving parts, inventory accuracy had to be live to be trustworthy.
Handling Physical Inventory versus Account Inventory
The Inventory Sync integration delivers real-time inventory visibility by synchronizing data between API Tire’s Infios OMS, its Warehouse Management System, and the FileMaker ERP. It creates a shadow inventory table in FileMaker that reflects current physical warehouse stock without disrupting the existing accounting inventory used for billing. A daily full synchronization at 3 AM Eastern over SFTP is supplemented by 15-minute delta updates for changed records and a daily hold-inventory feed from the WMS for damaged or grade B products. By segmenting inventory across multiple warehouse locations and client-specific pools—and surfacing future inbound stock via ASN data—the solution gives API Tire accurate, searchable inventory to support its growing warehouse-direct order business.
A central challenge was reconciling two fundamentally different views of inventory. The ERP’s accounting inventory table—used for billing and invoicing—could differ from the live physical inventory in the warehouse. A tire missing from one location did not mean it had left the warehouse; it may simply have been moved to a different location. To handle this reality, the process mirrored key WMS capabilities, including support for loss bins and alignment with the warehouse’s count checks and cycle counts, ensuring the physical and accounting views could be reconciled rather than conflated.
Lightening the Load on Customer Service
A central goal was to cut the manual, reactive workload on the customer service team by giving staff structured tools and the operational visibility they had always lacked.
Internal Visibility for CS Staff
Consolidated views of orders, shipments, allocations, backorders, and invoices – including BL number, container number, BL date, destination, ETA, and appointment date – surfaced directly to the customer service team so they could answer questions without chasing data across the systems.
Order Consolidation
Customer service and transportation teams review allocations daily to combine shipments and manage recurring schedules, supporting the truckload-accumulation pattern at the core of API Tire’s business.
Building in Resilience
With more than 20 integration touchpoints, reliability depend on disciplined error handling. We engineered defined failure from the WMS and an alert
Two Inbound Failure Modes were addressed:
A message that never reached the ERP (triggered a resend from the WMS and an alert), and a message that arrives but fails to update a record (handled by an in-application retry)
A Retry Workflow
Surfaces a Retry button to process the same payload, retrying up to six times for record-lock conditions and clearing automatically on success. The retry updates only order records – never inventory
Trapped Conditions
Record-locks and failed finds mean persistent failures point to a specific, diagnosable cause rather than silent loss
Validation Safeguards
Caught and resolved issues, such as a missing order type and a ship-date formatting error that the WMS API rejected
Proactive Alerting
Email, Slack, and UI flags ensures a failed automated send is caught immediately
The Impact
The WMS go-live was a success. On the first business morning after cutover, orders flowed into the system without issues, weekend shipments were pulled in and staged, and outbound consolidation worked correctly through the WMS.
Operational Modernizaiton
- Paper-and-memory warehouse processes replaced with RF scanning and directed workflows
- Real-time inventory accuracy across the operation
- Full tracking and audit of picking, loading, and shipping activity
Efficiency Gains
- Pick rules that improve warehouse-staff efficiency
- Shipment validation ensuring shipped products match the expected BOL
- Automated business riles that reduce manual customer-service intervention
A Connected Operation
- More than 20 integration touchpoints connecting ERP and WMS
- Resilient, self-healing integration flows with built-in retry and alerting
- A scalable foundation for future IT and integration growth
The WMS is working well — it’s ensuring the team is doing what they’re supposed to.”
— API Tire Operations
On a clean automated billing test, the reaction said it all: “It works. It was nice to do a test on something and have no issues.”
PREPARED FOR The Future
By concentrating on the warehouse and the systems that run it, API Tire now operates on a connected, real-time foundation built to scale. The manual processes that once defined the business have given way to automation, visibility, and resilience — and a platform ready to support whatever comes next. When you’re ready to forge your own digital transformation, let’s hammer it out together.
(Note: an Order Management System component and an OroCommerce eCommerce Dealer Portal were part of earlier planning; the OMS was descoped from the final implementation, and while the Dealer Portal was largely developed, the client elected not to proceed with its go-live. This case study reflects what was delivered.)
When you’re ready
Let’s hammer it out together.