If you company is small or mid-size special products or materials exchange broker, you probably have custom in-house made exchange application. Nowadays exchange is done over the internet, so you might have advanced web-based exchange application. Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains could play the role of the backend: accounting, sales and purchasing ordering, backordering, allocation, collection. In this case we expect tight integration between your exchange application and Great Plains. In this small article we consider industry / market niche specifics and the ways to realize these requirements:

• Exchange Transaction. Exchange transaction usually has two parts: Sales and Purchasing. This transaction should be translated into Great Plains as Sales Order in Sales Order Processing (SOP) and Purchase Order in Purchase Order Processing (POP). Assuming that you have web developers and C#, VB.Net programmers, you can deploy eConnect Distribution – this is Software Development Kit with sample codes, you can create or modify Great Plains objects, such as Sales Order, Customer record, Purchase Order, Vendor record. One warning about eConnect – it is designed based on general ERP application principles: you can create work transaction only – you can not post transaction, this is left for the Great Plains user

• Bill of Lading. In materials selling, when you order something you probably know number of packs or bundles, but you do not know exact weight or length. You get this information when you receive Bill of Lading. You need Bill of Lading automatic integration and qty update in Sales Order or Purchase Order. At this moment you do Sales Order allocation. eConnect, mentioned above should do the job

• Agent Commission. You could use Salesperson, associate him/her with items sold in Sales Order and then calculate and pay commission, using your own formulas.

• Reporting. In the case of integrated web application with Great Plains, we would expect heterogeneous sql queries and reporting, based on these queries and stored procedures. To produce nice and flexible reports – you usually deploy Crystal Reports and publish them in your web application.

• Transaction Posting. As mentioned above – this should be preferably done by Great Plains user with approval logic. However if you have thousands transactions per day or hour and it is physically not possible, you should go beyond eConnect functionality and post transactions automatically. You need custom stored procedures, posting and transferring Sales Orders. You can create these procedures yourself or purchase the ones, available on the market.

• Customization Tools: Great Plains Dexterity, Modifier with VBA, Transact SQL scripting to name the most popular.

About the author
Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer