Bill of Lading is required report for Logistics and Freight Forwarding companies. If you are looking at Freight Forwarding software, targeted to automate transportation business - Bill of Lading with multiple custom forms should be present there. However if you need the extension to standard ERP/Accounting application - you may be looking at the option to customize the system. Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains might be considered as ERP platform, ready for customization. Let us give you customization highlights.

? Sales Order Processing - SOP is the module, where you create customer order, transfer it into invoice upon the completion, fulfillment or allocation. So, naturally Bill of Lading should be originated in SOP. Also nice feature in SOP is multicurrency (Dollar, Euro, Yen, Yuan, Peso) support, so Bill of Lading report could be produced for international shipment

? MBL/HBL - House Bill of Lading may include several Master Bill of Ladings, associated with the shipment to specific customer. Microsoft Great Plains naturally associate invoice with single customer, this is why House Bill of Lading should be light Great Plains Dexterity customization, where you combine several shipments into one container (HBL). Simplified solution is just to use user defined fields for HBL & MBL.

? Cargo/Shipment Inquiry - you might also need to see the profit/loss on the shipment/HBL. This window should include all AR and AP invoices associated with HBL with drill down to original documents functionality. This maybe done as Dexterity, C#/VB.Net application, publishing SOP tables (SOP30200, SOP30300), or just a report

? Technologies. Microsoft Great Plains Dexterity is programming language and development environment of Great Plains. Great Plains Software has Great Plains Dynamics/Dynamics C/S+/eEnterprise and currently Microsoft Great Plains lines of products developed in Great Plains Dexterity. ReportWriter - this tool will allow you modify existing Picking Ticket, Packing List or Invoice form to produce Bill of Lading. ReportWriter has some restrictions: in order to place fields from your custom tables or from third party modules on ReportWriter report you need light Dexterity customization (rw_* functions). VBA/Modifier will allow you to modify Great Plains forms and attach VBA scripts to buttons. Crystal Reports - with Crystal Reports Designer you could produce the report of maximal complexity, including the report pulling info from heterogeneous databases (as if portion of your Bill of Lading info resides in Oracle, DB2 custom database).

Good luck with implementation, customization and integration and if you have issues or concerns - we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us a call 866-528-0577 or 630-961-5918! help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew is Great Plains specialist in Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ) - Microsoft Great Plains, Navision, Microsoft CRM Partner, serving clients inCalifornia, Minnesota, Illinois, Washington, Florida, Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Canada, UK, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Russia