How does drop-ship orchestration with Henry Schein / Patterson / Benco / Darby actually work in Magento?

Drop-ship is the highest-leverage move a dental supply distributor can make, you keep the customer relationship and margin without warehousing 25,000 SKUs. The Magento implementation:

• Routing rule per SKU + clinic zip, a Magento rule decides which distributor fulfils each line item. Henry Schein for East Coast surgical, Patterson for Midwest restorative, Benco for high-volume hygiene, Darby for price-sensitive consumables. The rule lives in admin, editable per category.
• Auto-PO generation via EDI 850, on order placement, Magento generates a PO and submits to the distributor. Henry Schein and Patterson support EDI 850 over AS2 or VAN. Benco and Darby have REST APIs (faster, cheaper to integrate).
• Order acknowledgement via EDI 855, distributor confirms PO acceptance + price + ETA back to Magento. If a SKU is backordered, Magento auto-substitutes or auto-cancels per the order rule.
• Ship notice via EDI 856 (ASN), tracking number + carrier + ship-date back to Magento. Magento emails a unified tracking link to the clinic so it looks like your shipment, not the distributor’s.
• Invoice via EDI 810, for accounts-payable reconciliation. Magento posts to your ERP (Sage Intacct / NetSuite / Microsoft Dynamics).

Two-warehouse split-ship handled: an order with 3 lines can come from your own stock + 2 distributors, consolidated to one tracking email. Timeline to ship one distributor connector: 2-4 weeks. All four: 8-14 weeks.