Distribution, Manufacturing, and Internet Modules

[Andy]

We currently enter our customer numbers manually into UPS Worldship to bring up customer ship to info. This can create problems if there is more than one ship to for a customer or if the number is entered incorrectly. I would like to create a barcode to print on packing lists that would bring up customer ship to information in Worldship.  What would be the best way to assign each ship to address in our system a unique "account number" that can be encoded?  Should I create a UDF for this field?

[DFeller]

Why not just barcode the sales order number or the invoice number from the packing lists and set up UPS Worldship to key directly off of MAS 90 and bring in the ship to address directly?

Also, are you exporting your tracking numbers out of UPS Worldship and importing them back into MAS 90 so customer service can package track while they are on the phone with a customer?

Dawn

[Heather]

I agree with Dawn.  We use the keyed import feature in Worldship & it works great. 

Here's a discussion of it that you might want to peruse.

[thebottomline]

Barcoding the SO number and linking to Worldship IS the way to do it.  Consider taking it a step further in phase two and pull your ship via information over to Worldship so that you don't have to change the shipping method.  You could even pull in the 3rd party/shipper bill to information (Their UPS account number) by storing that information in a UDF in the ship to code table.  Then you can get really fancy by importing the tracking number back into MAS as Dawn mentioned.

[BigLouie]

Linking MAS and World Ship so that World Ship pulls in the sales order address info has been around for at least 12 years. Very common.  UPS also has a program called Crossware that will write back the tracking information. You should get with your UPS account exec and technican on linking the two. However note the following:

Starting with Version 4.00, MAS 90/200 modules such as General Ledger, Library Master, Visual Integrator, Custom Office, and Development Studio are considered to be “Version 4 standard” modules while the others are considered to be “legacy” modules. In Version 4.10, Accounts Receivable, Sales Order Processing, RMA, and eBusiness Manager modules will also be coded at the Version 4 standard. 

All the Version 4 standard modules use only Crystal Reports as the reporting engine. Whenever a report from one of these modules is printed/previewed, a Crystal work table is created. All of these work tables are exposed in the MAS 90/200 dictionary. However, the physical file behind the work table often will not exist beforehand until the report for the work table is printed/previewed. When using software products that use ODBC connections, such as Crystal Reports, Business Alerts, Microsoft Access, SQL Data Transformation Services (DTS), any type of ODBC querying tool, etcetera, they will send a single command to request a list of tables available from the dictionary. At that point you can select the tables you need in your report/query/script.

When creating an ODBC connection with Worldship however, instead of requesting an initial list of tables, it will instead open and close an ODBC connection on each and every table in the dictionary (including the pre-defined views). Once completed it will present the list of tables and columns to the user. This creates 2 problems with MAS 90/200 ODBC connections. First, since many of the MAS 90/200 work tables do not exist until the report associated with it is run, the error “Physical File Not Found” will occur.  Second, because separate ODBC connections are opened and closed for each table regardless if the table is actually used in the shipment map, there will be a 4 – 10 minute delay before Worldship displays the available list of tables and columns. This means in Worldship, when entering the Sales Order Number for the Keyed Import value, a 4 – 10 delay will occur. This delay is due to the Worldship architecture. You must circumvent this problem by using a 3rd party database application as an intermediate application.

There are 3steps to allow Worldship to work with MAS 90/200:

1. Create an Access (or similar) database with a SQL Specific Pass Through Query
2. Create an Access DSN pointing to the Access database
3. Create a New Shipment Map in Worldship pointing to the Access DSN