Microsoft Dynamics GP or former name Great Plains Dynamics ERP has large number of installations in USA, Canada, Mexico, Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Asia. Modern market forces companies to go online and expose their stock through B2B or B2C e-commerce stores
If you are starting from scratch, then you should pick existing e-commerce add-on for GP, however if you ecommerce web store has long history and works as you need, then you should map custom integration to and from Great Plains. Obviously each case is unique and each company has different criteria and business procedures, in this small publication we will try to give you just general highlights in custom eCommerce programming
1. GP modules, exposed to integration. Likely these are Sales Order Processing module, receiving either customer orders or directly invoices. Also, Inventory Control module, which exposes inventory items, as well as pricelists and pricing schemas. Often you need to expose custom catalogues, depending on the customer class or individual customer. In this case, you need to build this catalog on the fly, based on customer login credentials.
2. Integrating Phases. Assuming that you already have ecommerce up and running, probably without or with minimal integration to Great Plains, the first phase should just send sales documents as they were generated autonomously in ecommerce to Great Plains SOP module. When this first phase is implemented and proved to be stable, then you could try to move the source of your items and pricing to Great Plains Inventory Control module
3. Integration tools. To try the simplest approach, which is not real time integration – try to either export your ecommerce orders to text file, or create advanced ODBC integration for GP Integration Manager. In the case of advanced ODBC source, your integration could look back to your ecommerce database and in After Document Commit script you can program ADO connection to your ecommerce database or GP orders integration status tracking table and mark order or invoice as integrated. If you need real time integration, then consider programming integration in eConnect, especially if you have good C# or VB .Net programmer with strong SQL architecture understanding. In certain cases you can create and deploy SQL custom stored procedures, however in this scenario you will be exposed to higher possibility of business logic violating bugs and their fixing
4. GP automatic batch posting. If you need your ecommerce application to post Sales Order Processing invoices all the way through GL directly from ecommerce and without GP operator approval and even involvement, then you will need Alba Spectrum Posting Server
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