EDI and Sales Orders

[Fishhead714]

Good Morning,
I read back through some of the threads on EDI and still have a couple of questions. We are implementing a shipping solution called Digital Shipper, which will pull down our sales via EDI and drop them into a MSSQL database. The software then waits for a shipping person to scan or type in an item number then will ping Fed Ex for tracking numbers for the requested amount of lables. Ok, so great I can ship all this out, but I need sales orders.
The orders come in generally in 2 week cycles, the customer (TV Shopping) will send 1500-6500 orders for 3-4 days at the begining of the cycle, then it will drop down to the 100's in the middle and end. What we have done in the past is enter one SO and relieved inventory, and billed the customer. What we would like to do is insert all those orders with seperate ship to address's and one bill to.
So the first questions is: Would you still get the Exact EDI software to bring the SO's in to the system? Or since the data will all ready be in a SQL database, would you go with the SQL solution.
Second, how the heck to pick, ship, bill, and invoice? Right now we use "Ship Confirm", once the warehouse has picked the orders we manually ship them from multi-bin locations (home goods - 1 item could be in 15 different bins due to size). With 5000 SO's in the system it would take forever to get all the manual work done.
One last question: When I go into System>Company>Package Settings I find EDI setup in the distribution tab, does that mean we all ready have the Macola EDI portion?
Meacola ES 360 4.0.0.321

Thanks!

 

[kscheeler]

If your customers are sending you orders via EDI, you could use the Exact EDI product to download the orders directly into Macola. Will Digital Shipper read a different database than the one it's populating? Another approach is to have a program populate that database the way it would have had it downloaded the orders itself.

If you want to keep the current program and then get the orders into Macola, you'll need a custom program to do that. Alot of people on this site, other resellers and Exact regional offices have written functions to create sales orders in Macola from various formats.

The EDI process in Macola will work with that number of orders though you'll probably want to automate the shipping / billing function since you won't want to select all of those orders manually. For picking / shipping do you use any barcoding functionality now?

I had a client on Progression that downloaded 1000 to 1200 EDI orders at a time from one of their trading partners so the system can handle it.


Kevin Scheeler