Great,Plains,Consultant,Newsfl computer Great Plains Consultant Newsflash: Custom EDI
----------------------------------------------------------Permission is granted for the below article to forward,reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website,offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as longas no changes a Gone are those times when the companies and the organisations didn't need a hi-tech system to handle them. Owing to the considerable increase in the business sector and thus, an enormous increase in the complexity of the organisational struc
Of course, for luxury EDI solution you can purchase Add-Ons and simply setup EDI export in the user friendly interface, however this publication is for people, who are either on the tight budget, or who have really complex EDI requirements and data format export rules. This news should also ideally help you with your Great Plains Partner, ISV and technical consultant and programmer selection:1. Header and Trailer. In order to produce header and trailer, you should consider unions, where you simply group your records to produce single heading and footing lines2. EDI lines. Normally these are items related lines, which you see either on customer or vendor invoice. You pull these lines from SOP30300 or POP tables3. EDI formatting. The idea is fairly simple EDI format is typically fixed length fields groups. In SQL Select statement you format each fields individually with either CONVERT or CAST constructions. Sometimes, especially new EDI rules require CSV or even XML files if you got these you should be lucky to avoid doing precise fixed length formatting. EDI with XML format are becoming popular in eCommerce scenarios4. Marking exported records. This task should be done by SQL stored procedure, this is why in EDI integration you should consider MS SQL Server DTS package creation. DTS package will allow you to export text EDI file (plus potentially email it to your vendor or even upload it to your vendor ftp) and run SQL stored procedure to mark exported records. In Great Plains for marking records you can either deploy existing fields, that are not in use by your business logic or user defined fields, plus you can create EDI export status custom table in each company database. GP doesnt have restrictions on creating custom objects in your company database, this restriction exists in other mid-market MRP applications, such as SAP Business One
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