IFS Cloud Shipping Solution Integration

Hi Chris, I subscribed hoping to hear an answer to this.

Right now, we’re in the process of upgrading our Shipping software to a 3rd Party Vendor via API. While we got the data written back to the Freight Details table, we don’t have a solution for applying charges. 

One idea is to have the 3rd party vendor create this, the other is to rebuild the Freight Interface rules in house via API logic. 

Hopefully a better answer comes across soon. 

Thanks, Jeff

This topic is such a mystery, it is so surprising to me that IFS has not provided more guidance to customers. However, the other side of it is that this particular area of integration almost always involves external hardware and software so providing some kind of generic interface is also a challenge. 

Regardless, we’re making progress on defining a solution.

I’m curious about your shipping API, we’re evaluating ShipEngine and ProShip.

Another challenge I’m digging into is how to deal with devices. Browser applications typically do not have a mechanism for talking directly to printers or scales. However, shipping solutions need to interface with both. Even IFS includes a native Windows application and browser extension that must be used for printing from IFS.

Are you integrating shipping label printers and shipping scales, and if so, how are you planning to interface with them?

Thanks for responding @jeff.nattermann … now I know somebody is listening 😉

-Chris

In the IEE days IFS NA had a solution with Agile Network that later merged with Logistyx Technologies. I last used it in 2018, not sure if it came forward into the cloud version.

Now that I think about it, the freight interface also worked with UPS World Ship and I think one of the Fedex products.

The only thing I didn’t like about it was that there are limitations with it and the IFS NA Credit Card interface.

Clippership needs ODBC connection to the IFS database. That was possible in Apps10 (we’re running something called BluJay Parcel, a global version pf Clippership). In Cloud, there’s no ODBC access to the IFS database so Clippership won’t work. The North American IFS Freight Engine/Interface was an extension for Apps8-10, so even that won’t work with Cloud. 

Option 1 would be to use a different Freight engine. For North America and Canada there is something out-there called PaceJet (www.pacejet.com,). Their ERP integrations page mentions Accumatica (bought by IFS and using similar API architecture). 

Option 2 would be an interface engine, like DELL BOOMI (expensive) just for the integration (transforming ODBC calls to API calls). You’ll still need your Clippership side of things licensed and supported. 

We chose to have the 3rd Party Vendor (SendFlex) create the charges based on rules provided by us. All is done via API. 

As for the printer/scales, SendFlex has an application on our PCs that handle this data transfer. I’m not on that side of the IT scale, so I don’t have a lot of details to share on that.

We also had challenges getting all the necessary APIs to the shipper without making multiple calls (we were up to 5 calls for a single shipment). In the end, we created a custom page that populates all the required fields and limited it to 2 calls. Anything we missed gets added to the custom pages and mapped. This also allows us to control exception rules for what gets sent and limit custom fields on end user pages.

I somehow missed replies to this post until now, but feel free to reach out and I’ll help/share.

Thanks, Jeff

hi everyone,

Please note that IFS offers a Freight Interface that comes pre-wired to our shipping interface partner Pacejet (part of 3G TMS). Pacejet contains dozens of pre-built interfaces to popular/common shipping companies (including UPS and Fedex).

There is work underway to offer an more ‘standard’/enhanced API for shipping interfaces (available as a multi-part release in IFS Cloud).

Happy to answer any additional questions on this topic.