Re: Has anyone had success with an ODBC connection allowing UPS World ship the ability to transfer freight charges directly into an SOP Order.
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.