Telling that no employee has commented on this question….

We’re trying to find out the same and have been told from Oct 21 “It is still in development”, but still haven’t found the details for it either.

Here it is Mar 22, we’re expecting it as part of a Cloud delivery, but no info on it yet.

There will be customers that Go Live with 21R2 including Freight Interface developed by IFS North America. We at R&D are looking at adding the Freight Interface to IFS Cloud core. More information about that in coming Roadmap publications.

I don’t believe this information is accurate.  Based on a call with IFS, there is no Freight Interface in the sense of the original IFSNA version.  There is no ODBC connection remaining information, in fact, there seems no uplift for the existing Freight Interface.  Rather there is a new REST API connected version of this that requires a third party software, PaceJet to accomplish the equivalent previous functionality.  

It seems that not many of the IFS employees themselves understand this, nor is anyone being up front about it at the quoting stage, at least in our experience.

No uplift, no migration, no carryover of existing UPS Worldship address info, new setup from scratch as none of the current connection information is valid.  More customer work and cost to replace existing functionality just to get back to like for like if you are moving up to Cloud from a previous version.

In general a lot has changed with technology shift IFS Cloud brings. What I highlight in my answer is that there are customers having Freight Interface in IFS Cloud, and that IFS Cloud core plans in the future is to improve in this area. So each customer journey into IFS Cloud need to have it’s assessment based on time plans and capability needs.

Yes, and I wanted to point out that the Freight Interface solution in IFS Cloud is not a complete solution, rather it is a connector to a third party software required to make it work.  The third party software requires additional setup, additional training for users, and an additional subscription based charged to another supplier besides IFS.  

When this isn’t revealed or quoted or explained at the beginning of the sales cycle for an upgrade, it is a significant problem to find it on the journey later.  But that seems to be the mode that IFS is operating on, reveal things in small pieces so it isn’t clear up front how many missing components and features that remain to be added back to Cloud.

Yes, it’s worth highlighting that complete depends on customer and planned IFS Cloud release.

Fact based and open communication is a key part of IFS. There’s no other way to manage the complex solutions and industries that we are operating in. If we don’t manage it well the long-term loser is IFS.
I have no details on any specifics what’s happened here and will not dig into that, but mistakes do sometimes  happen. We hold ourselves to high standards, try to do better every day, but we’re not perfect.
From my perspective, I think we have improved a lot being more globally aligned and how we communicate our releases and plans going forward, hence the earlier reference to coming publications of Roadmaps.

Hi @ShawnBerk / @ctaylor56,

Hate to bump an old thread but curious if you two have heard any further here.  From my limited understanding, I believe the integration with PaceJet that Shawn referenced was mentioned at WOCO.

Have either of you implemented this or heard anything else?

Thanks.  

Hey @astfarazt, I haven’t heard or done anything in this space for a while.  You might want to ask Steve Ross.  

In the process of integrating Pacejet with 22R1, soon to be 22R2.  We went forward with that solution and haven’t looked elsewhere really.  Just early days with it, haven’t got to the point of being able to run an order all the way through.

Thanks @ctaylor56 and @ShawnBerk for the replies.  I appreciate it.  

@ShawnBerk Interested to hear how your journey with Pacejet is going.

Hi @ShawnBerk ,

We’re also interested in your journey with Pacejet.  As we begin our upgrade path to IFS Cloud 22R2 I’m looking for success stories for freight rating.   Did you integrate directly with the Pacejet API’s or did you go though Dell Boomi for the integration?

Regards,

William Klotz

@jporter 

@william.klotz 

I can only say so far so good.  Pacejet have been very understanding at the very slow pace (pun intended) we’ve had to go with getting things setup due to numerous issues with IFS.  There were significant delays getting the full version of 22R2 that we wanted in place to go the full run and that caused a cascade of other delays.  None were Pacejets issue, all IFS. 

We had Pacejet integrated and talking to IFS Cloud 22R1, but had not been able to run a customer order all the way through using the Shipment module (a requirement by the way).  You can’t use just the normal deliver method that we built all of our customer order processes on.  So we are going to split and do shipments in the US where they will use Pacejet and stay with Deliver only in UK, Italy, Germany, and China since Pacejet doesn’t operate in any of those places yet.

We did connect directly using the Pacejet APIs, Boomi is not a requirement.

There is a fair bit of basic data and product information that needs to be added if you want to make full use of the capabilities.  You may already have this info in IFS (weights, dimensions, packaging types, standardized containers, etc), but we don’t have any of it documented, so there is a lot of additional setup that is required to use it.  Something we got away with when using the IFS NA Interface, just a bare bones setup really.  The Pacejet solution is quite a bit heavier due to the shipment process requirement and this additional setup.  Nothing that is the fault of Pacejet, just more info that IFS dumped off on a third party so the integration on their side was lighter and they didn’t have to uplift the IFS NA Interface to Cloud.

Did I cover all your questions?

Hi @ShawnBerk ,

It has been three months since the last post. How is it going so far? We are looking to implement the freight interface solution also. Do you have any documentation or additional information you can share with us? We are currently on 22R2, thinking about upgrading to 23R1 soon. Any insights or help would be greately appreciated.

Thanks,

Brian Pelz

Hi, I am also interested in any information on the IFS Freight Interface.? Is there any update or documentation for reference?

Thank-you

Fiona  

@BPelz @Fgray09 I’m in the midst of two different implementations utilizing the NA Freight Integration specifically with Pacejet (not the Freight Booking that was released in 23R1).  Do you have any specific questions?  

@astfarazt. I have reached out to PaceJet for a demonstration. My specific question at this time is if there is any IFS documentation regarding this functionality/integration? Or should I rely on PaceJet to provide such guidance?

Thanks,

Brian

@BPelz 

We are just picking up the whole project again after parking it last year.  Not the freight integration, I mean all of Cloud was parked.  Pacejet did a good job of getting the connections made so that PaceJet and IFS communicated, so take the opportunity for the initial setup with their project team from there.  However, after it is communicating, the actual steps within IFS for the shipment process are going to be up to you to sort out.  The IFS assistance and documentation is one of park it at the door and let someone else pick it up.  There really isn’t anything that details it from both sides and how to make it all work well.

If anyone has a better experience, hopefully they will share here.

Is there any other solutions to use beside Pacejet???  

We are Gov’t contracted and we just got confirmation from Pacejet that they are NOT FedRAMP or ASW government compliant.  So we can’t user them. 

Yes, there are two documents - both of which were created by IFS.  One is a functional document and the other is a technical document.  I’m not entirely sure if these are allowed to be posted on Community so feel free to PM me and I can send you the files directly.  

Do you already have the Freight Integration installed in an environment?  Pacejet won’t be able to demo much outside of their own platform.  Naturally, they only know the broad strokes of what needs to occur in IFS.  The set-up in IFS would fall to the Functional BA.

At the moment, I do not believe so.  My understanding was that in the future, additional freight aggregators would be supported.  Alternatively, I believe you can utilize the Freight Booking messages that were released in 23R1 as a starting point to send directly to a carrier.

We are upgrading… sort of.. To IFS 2024 R1 from IFS 10. 

This is an issue for us as well. I was told before we decided to move forward this was supposed to addressed. I see something called a freight module on our order form, but within our IFS 2024 install see nothing that seems to indicate this was added. 

Is anyone aware of any updates in this area?

​@rsczerowski If the North American Freight Integration (IFS internally calls it NA Freight Integration) is installed in your environment, you will see the below folder structure in the navigator (1st screenshot)

The NA Freight Integration still only supports Pacejet (to my knowledge).  

In parallel, IFS has/is developing the Freight Booking feature which has seen updates in the last couple of major releases.  The idea is that they provide you with a starting point to integrate with a TMS or a carrier.  As far as I know, that is apart of core IFS (i.e. no additional SKUs required).  This looks much more subtle, but you can see it on the Shipment record in the ‘Settings and Indicators’ group as well as in the ‘Share’ command group.

In order for this to send data externally, you would also need to configure a Routing Rule, Routing Address and Sender within IFS Connect.

IFS does provide an example Routing Rule which is called “Example: Outbound Routing Address for Freight”.

K thanks for the info. Really appreciate it.  I will need to dig into this some to see the current status and what the freight module on our order form means exactly. 

We have one company that really uses it at this point. Just with UPS, just for the tracking number (place on the delivery note), and to export the customer address info into UPS Worldship.

If you only need to integrate with UPS and just for the tracking number, I wouldn’t recommend the IFS NA Freight Integration because it would be excessive for the use case.  It supports rate shopping, insertion of charges on the Customer Order, AP Freight Accruals and Handling Unit functionality.  You would also have to pay a subscription fee to a 3rd party unaffiliated with IFS called Pacejet.  

If you don’t envision needing any of these functions in the near/long term and your organization has a technical team that can support integrations, you would be better off just integrating with UPS.  

Naturally, I’m not familiar with your business or any of your project particulars, but just my quick opinion based on what you’ve shared.