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Barcoding and WMS Integration to Dynamics GP

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If you decided to program Barcoding, Warehouse Management application in-house, you may still need Dynamics GP programmers with Distribution modules table structure and objects expertise.  There should be special reasons, as you can pick Supply Chain Management modules, available from Dynamics GP ISV partners as well as external WMS with the option of purchasing connectors to Great Plains Dynamics.  If you decided to program on your own – likely that your WMS is very simple and you are avoiding paying high license price to WMS vendors, or your warehouse operations are too complex and you need barcoding to be enabled in such Dynamics GP modules as Manufacturing or Bill of Materials.  Hopefully this publication will allow you to cover some distance in your homework marathon:

1. “Solutions” approach.  How about to deploy fragments of the source code of existing Warehouse Management System with Barcoding.  For example, let’s assume that you need automatic barcode based new Serial Number assignment upon items receiving in purchasing module.  Inventory replenishment is one of the several classic components of WMS, in Dynamics GP.  If your Serial Number assignment logic is not there, we could give you portion of the source code, where Restocking is realized to add the trigger for Serializing.  As final product you should get standard WMS with portion of the business logic altered according to your unique business requirements

2. Tiny WMS or SCM system.  This situation is often seen in small and mid-size distribution and retailing companies.  Due to the budget restrictions or even having this system historically deployed, you may have it programmed in Microsoft Access with VBA events handling, PHP or it might be historically done in DOS or in such programming languages as Visual Basic, C (where Barcode scanners are also programmed).  If you need WMS transactions to be sent to Dynamics GP SOP, POP, Inventory Control, Manufacturing or Bill of Materials modules, we recommend you to consider several tools.  The first recommendation would be Integration Manager, where you can move in Text file based data, or something more complex via Advanced ODBC Source – MS SQL Server view (including cross platform data queries: Oracle, MySQL, MS Access, Pervasive SQL to give you few examples).  Second tool to consider is eConnect, where you as Microsoft Visual Studio programmer are including eConnect libraries into your VS project (C# or VB are recommended as programming languages as you have SDK code samples in these languages).  eConnect should give you reasonable control over Dynamics GP transactions and master records (if you need automatic batch posting – you may consider Alba Spectrum Posting Server, as eConnect doesn’t have posting functionality).  The third tool to consider in our opinion is Microsoft Dexterity, this is in fact the architecture of original Great Plains Dynamics (the shell programmed in C++).  Great Plains Dexterity gives you unlimited power over all of the GP objects, however Dex requires long learning curve in becoming Dexterity programmer, so we recommend you to coup with experienced Dynamics GP Technology Partner with Dexterity gurus in staff

3. Special focus on Manufacturing and Barcoding.  It is possible to open Manufacturing Order and other screens to Barcode scanners.  Just to give you excurse to the issue – barcode scanner is similar to computer keyboard entry, but it is obviously a way faster.  However in order to have barcode scanner to be able to read the barcode label you would need to surf through multiple Great Plains forms and tab through the field in order to finally place the cursor over the field, which should be scanned.  In some of the cases you may consider purchasing tiny computers (netbooks) with barcode scanners attached via USB port, but we think that in the majority of cases you rather need custom Barcoding integration utility to open manufacturing windows to barcoding

4. For further information please call us 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918 or email us help@albaspectrum.com  Local service in Orange County, San Diego, Los Angeles, California, Chicago, Illinois, Houston, Texas, Southwest Michigan (St. Joseph, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Holland, Benton Harbor, Lansing).  We have our own Warehouse management System with SCM extensions, plus we have Great Plains Dexterity Software Development Factory, serving projects USA, Canada nationwide and internationally