One of the critical challenges enterprises of all sizes face is how to realize the potential of their ERP investment. One avenue towards accomplishing that is to leverage existing customer data resident in a company’s financial system through integration with key external business services provider operations. One such example is for package shipping. UPS WorldShip offers companies the opportunity to integrate their enterprise system seamlessly to make the generation of shipping labels and other shipping forms much simpler.

Once integrated, passing enterprise customer data between the WorldShip application and Microsoft Dynamics NAV occurs in real-time, avoiding additional data entry on both sides of the transaction. Once processed by UPS within WorldShip, shipment data is automatically updated in the NAV sales document. This allows a shipment via UPS to be tracked within the NAV system using the unique UPS tracking number.

Beyond the obvious savings in time and resources, this type of integration increases the speed and accuracy of shipping activities, provides the exact shipping charges for each transaction, eliminates manual data entry and errors, and automatically communicates key delivery information to customers.

Establishing the integration between WorldShip and NAV requires the following steps:

• Install UPS Software, NAV ODBC software and MS-Access on the system. A system DSN should then be created from the ODBC data source and the created data source database should be connected using the NAV license (license should contain ODBC granule)

• Create tables in NAV to store the shipment-related dat required by UPS. Transfer the data in the tables into MS-Access and write the queries to send the required field data to the WorldShip system. Then, create MAPS in UPS WorldShip to import the data into the WorldShip application and export the data back to the NAV system. Map the UPS fields to the Navision fields.

• To import data, write a query with customer-required conditions which when triggered, pass the information to the WorldShip system. Data will be imported automatically into UPS WorldShip by either batch import or keyed import depending on the specific situation and enterprise need.

• To export data to the NAV system, the shipping department selects “End of the Day” in the UPS Worldship system and complete orders will be processed with tracking numbers generated for every package. The generated tracking numbers, shipment cost, shipment address, number of packages, and all other shipment information are automatically exported to the NAV sales database using a MAP which is created specifically to export data from UPS WorldShip. E-mails are then be sent to the customer’s address with tracking number and a pre-defined template.

Leveraging an enterprise’s investment in Microsoft Dynamics NAV can be made much easier by integrating with some of the many software platforms that have been developed by business service providers across all of the key business processes the comprise the modern business.