Microsoft Great Plains Customization – Freight Forwarding/Transportation Industry Example
 by: Andrew Karasev

With this small article we'll begin series of industry solutions highlights for Microsoft Great Plains, Microsoft CRM, Microsoft RMS, Navision and cross-integrations. Check our website on logistics, distribution centers, warehouse management, barcoding, store inventory item count, shipping/receiving, online web ordering, ecommerce, international business, EDI, wholesale.

Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains version 8.5, 8.0, 7.5, Great Plains eEnterprise/Dynamics 7.0, 6.0, Dynamics C/S+ 5.5 and 5.0 serve USA, UK, South Africa, Australia, Middle East horizontal market. As being relatively inexpensive solution, it is reasonably open to be customizable to fit specific industry niche. In this small article we’ll give you highlight on how Great Plains could serve specific vertical demands of transportation and freight forwarding industry

Industry requirements:

    * Agent Monthly Settlement invoicing. Freight Forwarders use agents and usually pay them on the monthly basis, depending on the results. Freight Forwarded pays fees and collects money from customers, and if collection exceeds fees – it pays to the agent, in the opposite case it issues debit memo. Agent should receive detailed invoice.

    * Shipment Inquiry Form. Usually each Freight Forwarding has custom or standard shipping tracking system. This system is primary source of information about the shipment, then all the collections and fees and associated customer and vendor invoices are moved to Accounting Application, such as Microsoft Great Plains. From this accounting/ERP system we need Shipment Inquiry functionality with the report on the profit/loss from this specific shipment

Microsoft Great Plains realization:

    * Technology. Microsoft Great Plains sits on MS SQL Server platform and typical technologies are: Stored Procedures and also Great Plains Dexterity for Screens and Reports – this is Great Plains Software (currently Microsoft Business Solutions) proprietary software development language and IDE

    * Integration – is usually realized through Microsoft SQL Server linked server architecture and distributed queries. These queries might be triggered or placed as MSSQL Server overnight job. Transactions come to Sales Order Processing (SOP) and Purchase Order Processing (POP) modules, where they are placed into batches. Batches then should be processed by AP/AR departments

    * Agent Monthly Settlement. This should be realized as Great Plains Dexterity custom window, with two scrolling windows on it, where you should list SOP Invoices and POP Shipments with Invoices

    * Shipment Inquiry Form. Use the same Great Plains Dexterity custom window technology.

    * Reports – you are free to use either Dexterity report or Crystal Reports designer

Good luck and you can always seek our help in customization, implementation, integration and support. Call us: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, [email protected]

About The Author

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK

[email protected]