Serialized Items And Line Limits

The company I work for sells configured items that we would like to start serializing so that we can track locations each individual item.  However, we already are struggling with the 999 line limitation when we can ship multiple quantities of an item against a line.  From the reading and testing I've done, it seems that serialized items exacerbate this issue in that you cannot ship more than a quantity of 1 and each time you partial ship, it splits the line.  For example, if we have an order for 3980 configured widgets but can ship in multiples of 50,