Leveraging Custom Links to track carrier shipments in Sales Order Processing

You know, I believe I will forward this to MVP Frank Hamelly for his next session at the upcoming GPUG Summit Seattle 2012, "13 MORE Classic, Underused Features in GP".

And now that I did the plug in for Frank's session...

This week I have a chance to review one of those truly underutilized features in Microsoft Dynamics GP, this time, as a result of some quality control work I am performing at one of our projects going live in 2 weeks.

My customer, a specialty food and fine chocolates distributor here in the Washington D.C. area needed to provide his customer service staff with the ability to see package delivery status when products leave any of the 5 warehouses around the country. To make matters more interesting, they are currently using Savant Software's Shipping Manifest module coupled with Savant Software's Warehouse Management System, both of which are integrated to Microsoft Dynamics GP. When orders are shipped from the Shipping Manifest solution, product tracking numbers are returned to the order document in Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Tracking Numbers on the Sales User-Defined Fields Entry window

My customer uses the four major delivery carriers: UPS, DHL, FedEx, USPS, and Ontrac.

We used Microsoft Dynamics GP Custom Links feature to provide the package tracking capabilities required.

Custom Link Setup

To setup a link to the Fedex tracking site, you select the Prompt to which you want to associate the link, in this case the "Tracking Number" prompt. You will then provide a prompt to display for the link, "FedEx Tracking". Next, you will want establish the field value for which the prompt will be displayed, in this case we want to display the Fedex Tracking prompt when the associated shipping method is FEDEX GROUND. Finally, we need the URL for the FedEx tracking website and need to pass in the tracking number string as a parameter to the URL. This is accomplished with the "%1" string substitution moniker at the end of the URL.

The result is shown below:

Tracking Number Custom Link

When the link is selected, the user is directed to the FedEx tracking site where information is displayed about the tracking number selected.

The following are tracking sites URLs for each of the major carriers, with the corresponding string substitution parameter for the tracking number:

DHL
http://www.dhl.com/content/g0/en/express/tracking.shtml?brand=DHL&AWB=%1

FedEx
http://fedex.com/Tracking?action=track&tracknumber_list=%1

UPS
http://wwwapps.ups.com/etracking/tracking.cgi?submit=Track&InquiryNumber1=%1&TypeOfInquiryNumber=T

USPS
https://tools.usps.com/go/TrackConfirmAction_input?qtc_tLabels1=%1

Ontrac
http://www.ontrac.com/trackingdetail.asp?tracking=%1

Happy package tracking!


MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/

Comments

Beat BUCHER said…
Hey Mariano,
Thanks for sharing that very useful tip. I wasn't even aware that GP offered custom links... Will definitively see if it's applicable elsewhere in the system.
Beat
June 14, 2012 at 12:51 PM
David Eichner said…
Advanced SOP Entry from ICAN Software Corp allows for storing tracking number at the sales line level for each line of a sales document along with many user defined fields. Maybe we can use this for our fields as well?
June 15, 2012 at 1:32 PM
David Eichner said…
Advanced SOP Entry from ICAN Software Corp has tracking number for each sales line item...as well as many user defined fields. Perhaps we could use this for our custom dex fields as well?
June 15, 2012 at 1:34 PM
MarkW101 said…
Mario,

Check out this web link:

http://www.socius1.com/dynamics-gp-tip-custom-links-to-shipping-carriers/

I didn't see your name on the page...
July 6, 2015 at 3:44 PM
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