Microsoft Retail Management (RMS) and Microsoft Great Plains are retail and accounting/ERP solutions coming from the same Microsoft subdivision – Microsoft Business Solutions. There is often common need to do integration between the two. Despite the fact that both systems come from the same software development company – the integration is not as simple as it probably should be. In each case you have to use set of new Microsoft technologies: web service, SQL stored procs, C#, VB.Net programming, etc. In this small article we give you customization overview when you receive Purchase Order Receivings in Great Plains and automatically transfer them to the RMS Store Operations via web services. Plus we can push serial number info from Great Plains to Store Operations (there is no way to store serial number in Headquarters)

Item Transfer Trigger in Great Plains

Microsoft Great Plains is written in Great Plains Dexterity – proprietary programming language and development environment, which has strong ties with SQL stored procedures and queries

When Items are transferred in Great Plains via the Item Transfer Entry window, the interface must recognize this transaction. This can be accomplished via two mechanisms:

1. Dexterity Trigger, which would identify that the transfer occurred and it would populate an interface table

2. SQL Trigger on IV00200, which would populate an interface table. The assumption is that all transferred items will be serialized

Handling

Once the interface table is populated, there might be either a timed procedure or a trigger that will push the transfer from Great Plains into RMS Headquarters and it will create automatically a Style 307 Worksheet in Headquarters.

The next time that the store “receiving” the inventory communicates with Headquarters, it will receive the Inventory Quantity Adjustment notification, which will increase the item’s quantity on hand.

In each store, a web service should be installed to handle transfer of Serial Number information. Therefore, when communication is established between Store Operations and Headquarters, an application that continuously monitors Stores (in the computer hosting Headquarters) will communicate with the web service at the Store level to transfer the Serial Number information and to update the serial number tables in Store Operations.

Luis Leung is Lead Software Developer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Microsoft RMS, CRM, Microsoft Great Plains customization company, with offices in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Madrid, Moscow, Europe, Brazil, Mexico (www.albaspectrum.com), he is Microsoft CRM SDK, C#, VB.Net, SQL, GP Dexterity developer. Luis can be reached: 1-866-528-0577 or help@albaspectrum.com.