I use UPS WorldShip to calculate and manage my shipping but would like a way to have the calculated charges automatically added to the SOP order. I was told this could be done by creating an ODBC DSN which UPS would access GP and add the freight charge to the order.
Has anyone done this successfully?
Thank you
*This post is locked for comments
If you're willing to purchase it, ShipGear from VTechnologies (www.vtechnologies.com/shipgear_home.htm) is a great solution and does exactly what you're looking for, in addition to writing more complete and configurable data to the noted field of the SOP order (billed weight versus rated weight, tracking, per-package tracking numbers, etc) We've been using it for several years in our manufacturing business without a hitch.
Hi Dan,
I've worked for a manufacturing company where we used to ship small parcels with UPS WW and yes there is a way to write back some information to GP, thought very limited... i.e. we used to write back the tracking number(s) into the user-defined fields of the SOP10106 table. No need to use a specific ODBC DSN, you can use an OLEDB string to connect to your company database and update the records. Be careful to test is out in a TEST bed environment to make sure it does not scrap anything else. The same should work for the freight charges (we used to write them separately into the SOP10106 as well, since wanted to compare the real shipping costs vs. the one we charged standard to the customers and see if there were large variances at the end of the month. The small replacement parts had the shippings costs already included in the price...). At the end of the week / month, you run Crystal reports or Excel queries against the various historical sales order and sum up your numbers for whatever usage you want them.
The drawback with UPS WW is that the write operation occurs only once if I'm not wrong, so you don't get many chances to update after the shipment was done (unless this has changed since the time I used it).
The other thing you can do is connect to the dBase data files from UPS (they are located on the system where the apps is installed, and a new file is created every day after the closing is done). I used to connect with MS-Access and pumped out all the data for the shipping costs and tracking numbers to update GP in one shot (this was before we put the real-time update into place with the assistance of UPS tech support).
Good luck in your project.
Stay up to date on forum activity by subscribing. You can also customize your in-app and email Notification settings across all subscriptions.
André Arnaud de Cal... 291,151 Super User 2024 Season 2
Martin Dráb 229,993 Most Valuable Professional
nmaenpaa 101,156