Jeremy,
We implemented third-party software to automate the transportation carrier process. The software we use is called Clippership, which we purchased from a company called Kewill, but there are also others out there such as Varsity Logistics, etc. It automates the tracking number retrieval and billing for our three primary carriers, FedEx, UPS, and Airborne. But it sounds like you already have UPS Worldship software, so you should be fine with that.
I'm hoping in the future JDE will provide business functions to do the same, but I'll give you an overview of how we handled this. If anyone would like more details, I'd be happy to provide you with them.
We created a UBE to load adress records, order lines, and item information into Clippership via ODBC. Once this data is in Clippership, they can override addresses, carriers, etc.
There are two processes we have in place to get this data into JDE and ship-confirm the order.
The first is another transfer to a custom-JDE table we created to hold shipping information. Then we have an RPG program which loads the Transportation files. If you don't have the Transportation module for JDE, I would you look into it, because it has fields to hold tracking numbers, pieces, etc. It also lets customer service (after some initial setup) track orders online automatically from the sales order screen, which they love. The RPG program also updates the sales order address record (F4006) without touching the customer's permanent address book record (F0101)if an address override was done in Clippership.
The second process we do uses a few subsystem jobs and an AS/400 database trigger. Once a record exists for a shipment in our custom JDE table (we call it F5931) the database trigger sends a record with order number, lines, etc to the ship-confirm batch application (R42500) which in turn calls the EDI transaction file R47500 and then retrieves processing options from a version of ship confirm interactive that you specify (P4205). This entire process will update the order to invoice status and relieve inventory in just a few seconds of confirmation in Clippership.
It took quite a bit of work initially, but once set up it works nearly flawlessly for us.
Like I said, I think you should look into using the transporation module, and also experiment with the ship confirmation batch application.
Justin Revoredo
Amersham Biosciences
Piscataway, NJ
OW B7332 Coexistence SP11.1
AS/400 Oracle
Citrix/Fat
