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We are in the beginning stages of a migration from an AS400 ERP to IFS Cloud. I’m an enterprise software engineer who is new to the IFS world.

Our current warehouse shipping process involves a piece of custom software that screen-scrapes from an AS400 terminal session into a Windows application called ClipperShip. This software handles all the carrier specific logic, including printing labels, etc., then another piece of custom software gets the data out of ClipperShip and back into the AS400 ERP.

We would like our new solution to be as simple as possible for warehouse employees. Ideally it would be completely web-client based. We have started evaluating some API-based shipping solutions like ProShip and ShipEngine. Here are my questions after reading through the technical documentation:
 

1. It seems that the shortest path to getting something functional would be to use a solution that already provides a client user interface, build a piece of custom middleware that uses the OData REST APIs to get data out of IFS Cloud and use the provider API to get the data into the shipping solution. Is this feasible?

2. Longer term, if we wanted to customize pages within IFS so the complete shipping process could be managed with the IFS Cloud Aurena client, what is the best technical approach within IFS Cloud to get the order data from IFS to a cloud solution in a push-fashion? Would be that through IFS Connect?

3. Is #2 even feasible or does any kind of interfacing with an external cloud entity need to be driven by some middleware that pulls from IFS and pushes to the 3rd party API, then to update the DB does the same?

4. Is there any documentation available on how to integrate non-ODBC shipping solutions into an IFS Cloud based workflow?

Thanks,
-Chris

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. 

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