Starship Freight Upgrades

[ChrisP520]

Greetings:

We would like to do some promotional freight upgrades for some of our customers. For instance, we would ship via UPS Next Day Air but would charge only the ground rates.

What I want to know is there any way that I can have Starship use the Next Day Air ship method, write the ground rate back to Macola and still bill us for the Next Day Air rate. I see these kinds of things all the time on web sites and such. How is it done in Macola.

We run Progression 7.6.300C on SQL 2000 and Win2K3 Server and Starship 9.6.

Thanks,

Chris

 

[abaldwin]

That is a very good question that I do not think I have heard before. I would off the cuff think this would require a modification or enhancement to Starship as Flex or macola does not actually interact with Starship......Wait one minute. Starship actually interacts with macola. In otherwords Macola is not Starship data aware, or able to manipulate Starship calculations. Starship simply writes back through ODBC to the Macola data.

Any thought from others on this would intrigue me.



Andy Baldwin

"Testing is the most overlooked programming language on the books!

 

[MacolaHelp]

You can create freight rules inside SS that write back to Macola. You should pay for a support call to V-Tech @ $50 to get help to do this. It would take more than 1/2 hour of my time to help you with this, but it can indeed be done.

 

[ChrisP520]

Hello MacolaHelp:

Thanks for the heads up. We have a support agreement with V-Tech. They told us it could not be done.

Chris

 

[abaldwin]

I was afraid of that. Hence the statement earlier that it would require an upgrade/enhancement for SS.

Andy

Andy Baldwin

"Testing is the most overlooked programming language on the books!

 

[ChrisP520]

Hi Folks:

Thank you for your input. I just spoke with V-Tech and they told me that the freight rules would apply to ALL shipments. There is no facility for the rules to look at a specific ship via. The reason we would do it with a ship via is because we would not offer this to ALL customers.

With that said, here is what we will be doing. We are going to automate the periodic download of the UPS rates into SQL. We will then use a SQL trigger that looks for that ship via. Once the trigger fires, it will search the ground rate and write it back to the freight field.

This will save HOURS of time in employee activity as well as "fixing" the one's that were missed.

If you like, I will let you all know how it works out.

One last thing. V-Tech is thinking of adding this to Starship but it won't be anytime soon.

Regards,

Chris

 

[stravis]

Chris your solution should work beautifully. We have used the SQL trigger method you are employeeing in similar solutions and had no problems. The only thing you may want to consider is accounting for difference in actual shipping cost and shipping charged from an accounting perspective. This can usually be done after the fact but the question is best left to accountants, which I am not.

Scott Travis

http://www.infoSpring.net