Consolidate Your Shipping Workflow in Business Central with Dynamic Ship

Good morning or afternoon, everyone. This is Mark here, and we’re about to get started on this week’s webinar, which is all about shipping from within Business Central. What we’re going to do today is go through how you can manage fulfillment, specifically shipping, and all the functionality available using Dynamic Ship.

To get started, we’ll go through a short PowerPoint just to cover what we have available and what you can do from a shipping perspective. Then we’ll get into the software itself. We’ll probably run about 45 minutes or so, but it also depends on how many questions you have. If you do have questions, enter them in the questions panel in the GoToWebinar interface and I’ll do my best to answer them as we go through the session, or at the end. There were a few questions submitted ahead of time, and I’ll try to cover those as well. If I don’t get to your questions, we’ll send you an email with the answers afterward.

About Insight Works

A little bit about Insight Works: we’ve been around for about ten years now and work mostly in warehousing and manufacturing. We do retail as well, so we have a point of sale solution and all sorts of things. The key is that we work through our reseller partners. If you have questions, or if you need quotes, and your partner is one of our resellers, and I think we have over 800 now, check with them. They’ll be able to help you out. You can also go to our website, and we’ll give you the links at the end, and get hold of us directly there. But we can work through your partner.

I’m not going to go through all of these things, but we do a lot with shipping. This is kind of an older slide, and we’re actually doing more than that now. We do a ton with shipping in Business Central. This stack of blocks over here is really a representation of all the applications we have available.

Free Apps for Business Central

A subset of these applications is also completely free, so I’ll cover this quickly because it’s nice to have free stuff, and then we’ll get into the shipping side. These ones here at the top are all free for cloud implementations. You can go to AppSource, or what they call the Marketplace now, install them, and go ahead and use them. There’s no registration or anything like that. If you’re on premises, some of these are available on premises for free, but most of them are cloud only.

The Enhanced Planning Worksheet and Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet are useful in a warehouse or manufacturing environment where you’re planning your purchasing. This is really doing your MRP, purchase planning, and sales forecasting. The ones in green are more utility type products. Your partner is probably going to use them more than you will directly, but they help with cloud printing, getting data in and out of the system, generating barcodes, and all sorts of other things.

Down at the bottom are the ones you might be more inclined to look at based on the webinar you’re attending here. Graphical Scheduler is used for drag and drop scheduling. The default when you install it is production, so that’s the default view, but we have views for planning your warehouse picks. If you want to schedule and assign warehouse picks, we have views for that. If you want to do assembly orders or jobs or whatever you want, you can create whatever views you like, even with custom data, just through configuration, and visualize that on the Graphical Scheduler. It’s a nice tool.

Doc Extender is drag and drop document management. In Business Central you can drag and drop documents, and this one is a lot better. You can store things in SharePoint, and it keeps everything nicely organized for you. It’s a much nicer tool than the standard Business Central functionality.

Order Ship Express

These two here are the most pertinent for this webinar. Order Ship Express is a free app for shipping, so there’s no cost for the application or anything else if you’re doing domestic parcel shipments. This is a completely free app from Insight Works for Business Central. It works in any country, but the shipments have to be domestic. If they’re domestic parcel shipments, you can get your labels, your tracking information, and your costs directly within Business Central. You don’t have to go to the carrier software or anything like that.

You can have up to three carriers in the system at a time, and you can go out and get your rates, including discounted shipping rates. Order Ship Express takes about ten minutes to set up and you’re off and running, getting your shipping labels in Business Central. I might show some of that in the webinar if you’re interested, but there’s an online video that goes through this in a lot more detail. Again, if you’re doing domestic parcel shipments, that is potentially a very good option for you, and it doesn’t cost you anything.

WMS Express

WMS Express is warehouse management, and it’s completely free. This is a completely free app from Insight Works for Business Central. It’s tailored for people who just need the core functionality on mobile devices, and that core functionality is receiving, picking, shipping, bin movements, and inventory counts. If that’s all you need to do on a mobile device, WMS Express is probably all you will ever need. On the website there’s a video on this, and also a list of all the capabilities and the differences between this and the full warehouse management solution we provide.

How the Fulfillment Apps Work Together

What we’re here for is really the shipping side, but shipping is just one part of what you need to do in Business Central to get stuff out the door. We have a very good ecosystem for managing all of that fulfillment. All of these apps are separate. You don’t have to buy the whole suite, you buy whatever you need, and they all work together automatically.

That first one, the Enhanced Planning Pack, includes the Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet and Enhanced Planning Worksheet, which are free if you just want to use those individually. With the Enhanced Planning Pack you get a bunch more, mostly for production. The planning pack is really about planning what’s coming in the door: we’re getting all our inventory in, or planning what we’re producing, so we have inventory we can then decide to ship.

The Order Fulfillment Worksheet is almost a must have if you have a high volume of orders, or even without high volume, if you have somebody coming in in the morning asking, what do I need to ship today, or what can I ship today? That’s where you need the Order Fulfillment Worksheet. Business Central doesn’t really have a great tool for that. There’s a pick worksheet, but it doesn’t do a good job of answering those two questions. The Order Fulfillment Worksheet also automates the creation of the picks or the warehouse shipments, or just printing off the picking list by order report, to trigger the warehouse to start picking for shipping.

Once we’ve generated the picks, if you want to do picking on mobile devices you can use Warehouse Insight or WMS Express. Warehouse Insight is our full warehouse management solution and does a lot more than just picking. You can also generate shipping labels from within Warehouse Insight on the mobile devices.

At any rate, we generate the pick, whether we use the Order Fulfillment Worksheet or the base Business Central functionality, and we send it out to be picked in the warehouse where they use Warehouse Insight, WMS Express, or paper. Once we’ve picked it, we take it over and we need to ship it out. That’s where we use Order Ship Express. Again, for domestic parcel, this might be all you ever need. If you’re doing international shipments, if you need simultaneous multi carrier rate shopping, or if you need LTL, that’s when you want to look at Dynamic Ship.

What Dynamic Ship Does

What does Dynamic Ship have? It’s got a lot. If you look at our knowledge base and the release notes, you can see it does a huge number of things. But the core of it is that it gives you the ability to go out and get your shipping rates from multiple carriers at the same time, and to generate your shipping labels, bills of lading, and commercial invoices for international shipping. It works with parcel, LTL, and full truckload.

We have a whole bunch of connectors to different APIs. Some of those APIs are direct to the carriers, and some are through what we call API providers, which have a number of carriers they work with. We have over 30 of these connectors that you can plug into Dynamic Ship to get access to the carriers and the features you need.

We do freight quotes from sales quotes or sales orders, which means if you want to quote a price to your customer right when you’re doing order entry, we can do that. Then we can have rules that determine what we’re charging the customer for that shipping, so we can mark up based on the carrier, the service, the freight value, the order value, and so on. We can do discounts, and we can charge the customer for that shipping automatically.

Address validation is nice, and it’s either automated or manual. You can click a button to validate the address, or it can be triggered automatically when you’re entering addresses or releasing sales orders.

Packaging Options

Sometimes people get the trial version, because there’s a 30 day trial you can install and experiment with, and they watch the demo videos and say, I have to scan everything, and I don’t want to scan anything. We do have that ability. We have the ability to scan the product, your packaging, and the commands, using a USB barcode scanner attached to the shipping terminal. That’s the ideal situation, so that’s typically what we demo, and I’ll talk about why. But you never have to scan anything.

We have a quick entry approach where you just say, give me two shipping labels for these two boxes, and you’ve got your shipping labels in about ten seconds. You can manually pack, which means you can plan your pallets ahead of time and pack them in an individual way. We have auto packing, where you set up rules that say to ship these five products you need one pallet and one carton, and it will figure out how to package that product for you. There are lots of different ways to do it, and the packaging capability within Dynamic Ship is one of its key points. We package everything up, so we know what we sent to the carriers and they can give us accurate rates coming back.

Integration with Warehouse Insight and EDI

As I mentioned earlier, if you want to generate shipping labels from within Warehouse Insight through Dynamic Ship, you can do it. For EDI, we have the ability to print your SSCC labels for cartons or pallets as you’re packaging them, and we have EDI integration to send the ASN with some of the major EDI providers. Many of them have created their own integration into Dynamic Ship. I think there are four or five now that have integrated with us, so if you’re working with some of the large EDI providers out there, they will have integration with Dynamic Ship to send your ASNs automatically.

And then of course you saw the fulfillment slide. We have the Order Fulfillment Worksheet, Dynamic Ship, Warehouse Insight, and all of these things work together to give you a comprehensive solution for managing your outbound processes. We’re not just talking about a solution that lets you print shipping labels. If you need everything else, we have that as well.

API Connectors and Carrier Access

Most of the carriers we talk to through Dynamic Ship are accessed through one of our API providers, so it’s a third party API provider that we connect to and get rates from. We do have some direct connections, and I’ll talk about that in a second, where we connect directly to the carrier. You can have as many of these installed as you like, so you can have a direct connection to one carrier and then another connection to an API provider that has another 20 carriers you can talk to.

Those API providers determine what services and capabilities are available. They’re third parties, so we don’t have any control over them. It’s always best to check with them on what they can do and what their pricing is like, and determine which one you want to work with. That’s especially important on the LTL side.

Just to give you an idea, we have over 30 of these now. Some are just plug in and go. Our support team will help you out, they’ll get you the connector, they’ll plug it in, and away you go. Others require a little bit more work to plug in, and there are a couple that are still in development. What’s nice about this is that if you’re coming from an existing system, and a lot of people are upgrading from Dynamics GP and things like that, and you’re already working with somebody, we likely have a connector. You don’t have to change the service you’re using. You move to Dynamic Ship, you plug in the connector for that particular service, and away you go. If we don’t have a connector, we can build one for that particular service you’re using, and you can talk to us about that.

If you want something quick and simple, and you’re doing parcel shipments, international or domestic, one of our key connectors, and the one that gets installed with Dynamic Ship, is EasyPost. There is special pricing for Dynamic Ship. If you go with EasyPost, you have to sign up with the link we provide in the installation instructions on our knowledge base, or our support people can help. If you do that, I would say at least half of the people using Dynamic Ship won’t pay anything for that EasyPost service, because you get 3,000 shipments a month for free. There’s no monthly cost or anything like that.

We also have some direct connectors, like FedEx and FedEx Freight and a whole bunch of others, where we’re not going through any third parties. We’re going direct to the carrier: USPS, FedEx, and others, to get access to their capabilities. But again, if you install Dynamic Ship, EasyPost gets installed with it. It’s a very quick and easy setup to get up and running.

What Domestic Means

There have been a few questions before I jump into the demo. Yes, there is going to be a copy of this webinar sent afterward. And when I say domestic, I mean whatever country you’re in. If you’re in Denmark and you’re shipping within Denmark, that’s domestic. If you’re in Canada and shipping within Canada, that’s domestic. If you’re in Canada and shipping to the US, that’s international. All of these solutions work in any country. When I say domestic shipping, I mean within the country you’re shipping from.

Shipping from a Sales Order

Let’s jump in and look at what this software can do. I’m going to start with sales orders. I don’t really have a prepared script for this, so depending on the questions you have, this might take us in all sorts of different directions.

This is a sales order I often use with Order Ship Express, so let me show you that first. Order Ship Express is very simple. I have these things I need to ship, so I come in here and hit Create Shipping Labels, enter the size of package I want to ship, and choose my carrier. I forget which one I have set up for these guys, but we’ll just do FedEx Ground. If that was set on the sales order, it would come in automatically. If I want, I can preview the rate. If I hit Get Rate, it tells me what it’s going to cost me. There are very simple markups in Order Ship Express. I can also set basic options, so if I don’t need an adult signature on this shipment I can come in and change that, and it’s a little cheaper that way. Then I hit Get Label and it gets me my shipping label for this box. I can have multiple boxes listed here. That’s Order Ship Express, very quick and easy to set up, and a great little tool.

I’m not going to grab the label, but I did do that rate quote and it added the price onto the order. Over here is what you get with Dynamic Ship. You get the freight quote capability, where I can go in, and if I’m using auto pack it can estimate the number of boxes I have. Or if I just say I’m shipping one 10 pound box, I can go out and get the quotes and it will list all the carriers and the quotes for those carriers. I don’t know if I’ll get many here because I set it to FedEx Ground, so I may only get the FedEx Ground quote, but what it will do is list all the different carriers I have available for the shipment, both LTL and parcel. We get LTL rates and parcel rates together. Then I can accept that and add it to the order. That’s the freight quote.

Quick Label in Dynamic Ship is a lot like Order Ship Express. I can enter the types of boxes, and the difference here is that I have templates. I can say I want to ship one small box and then get the weight from a scale, or just type in the weight, and I can generate my shipping labels directly from this Quick Label capability.

Address Validation

Address validation is quite nice in here as well. Let’s say I forgot the state. That was shipping into Georgia, and I forgot the state. If I hit Validate Address, it comes in and automatically corrects it, because based on the ZIP code it knew this was supposed to be Georgia, and it fixed that for me. If I had some other error, like a missing street number, it would tell me there’s an error with it, but I’d have to fix that manually.

So I can execute this address validation manually here, or you can set it up so that when I enter that address, or when I release the sales order, it does the validation for me automatically. If I don’t validate the address at any point and there is an error, it’s just going to give me an error when I try to generate the label, because it will validate the address at that point. It can’t generate a label for a bad address.

From the sales side of things, these are the functions you have available. You can do that quoting up front, you can do the address validation, and you can ship directly from a sales order if you like.

Deciding What to Ship with the Order Fulfillment Worksheet

The typical way we see Dynamic Ship used, or the way it’s built to be used primarily, is in a situation where you’re picking in the warehouse and bringing it over to a packing station, and we want to package it up to get it out the door. To get the pick out to the warehouse, I’m going to very briefly cover the Order Fulfillment Worksheet I talked about earlier. This is important, because how do you know what to ship if you don’t have something like this?

The location code I’m in here is what we call a directed put away and pick location. It’s advanced warehousing, so I have warehouse shipments and warehouse picks enabled. If you don’t have that, that’s fine, you don’t need to use these. But what this does is tell me whether I’ve created the pick for it already. This one is telling me that I can partially ship this, but I also have to move product from a non-pickable area to my pick area. This one is telling me it’s fully available to ship, this one is partially available, and so on.

The important part is that you notice it says this order needs six of these, and I have eight available to pick. That’s not necessarily how many I have in stock, that’s how many I have available to pick. There are a whole bunch of things it looks at. Is the lot number blocked? Is it expired? Is it in a pick location? Am I allowed to pick it as it’s sitting in receiving and I haven’t put it away yet, or it’s flagged for cross-dock? Am I allowed to actually pick it and ship it yet? It looks at a whole bunch of things to determine what I can physically pick in the warehouse, and then allocates six of those to this order.

The next order that needs this particular item is now only going to have two to choose from. It dynamically allocates as it goes through this list. So later on, if I have a bunch more of these that are required, they’re not going to be able to ship because we’ve allocated that stock ahead of time. By default it’s doing it by date, so it’s looking at the oldest orders first and deciding that my back orders get first crack at the inventory. But I can do it by carrier, customer, priority, order value, or whatever you want to do.

Maybe I want to focus on my high value orders. I’ve got very big orders here, and these are all partially available. If you look at this first one, I can only ship a quantity of one on one of these items. But now that I’ve said I want to prioritize by order value, all I did was sort by order value and recalculate, and we can see there are actually a few things I can ship on this particular order if I re-evaluate based on the different scenario.

At any rate, this tells you what you can ship and does that allocation automatically. I hit Create Picks, it creates the picks, optionally prints them or sends them to the handheld devices, and I’m good to go. This can also run behind the scenes, so that every ten minutes or half hour it’s automatically generating picks for the warehouse based on what’s available to ship. It can be a completely automated picking process and back order management as well. There’s a good online video of that in all its glory. But again, if you have high volume, or if you have people wondering what they’re supposed to do when they come in in the morning, you want that Order Fulfillment Worksheet.

The Package Worksheet

Once that’s done, we’ve sent it out to the warehouse. They pick off the paper document, or they use Warehouse Insight to do the picking, and then they come back and drop that off at a packaging station. Or maybe it’s the same person and he brings it over to the packing station. Now we need to package that order up, and this is the Package Worksheet.

In this case somebody dropped off an order for me at my station and I’m going to start packaging. I have a USB barcode scanner in my hand, so I’m going to scan the barcode on that pick ticket. It brings up the order for me and tells me what I need to package. These lines are in red because I haven’t packed them yet, so we still have these unpacked quantities over here. It tells me what packages I have defined and how I’m supposed to ship this.

Choosing the Carrier at Time of Shipment

I’m going to change this quickly and blank out the shipping agent. Normally it would default in exactly as it is on the sales order. That was UPS Expedited listed as the shipping agent and service, and when I go out and get my shipping label it’s just going to generate a label for UPS Expedited. But I’m going to leave it blank, and blank means the shipper, or the person doing the packaging, gets to choose the carrier.

That’s not typical, especially if you’re doing parcel shipments. Usually that’s predefined for you, or you can have it set up so it’s blank and it just chooses the cheapest option every time. But in this case, the way I have it set up, if I haven’t pre-specified the shipping agent on the sales order, I get to choose at the time of shipping which carrier to use. That’s useful in LTL, because I can do all my rate shopping across LTL carriers, and in parcel sometimes as well.

Packing Instructions and Comments

Down here it gives me all the details about where I’m shipping it to, all my packages, and some comments. There was a question on the signup about how you enforce the use of foam packing, peanuts, and things like that. This gives you those instructions, but it doesn’t enforce anything. If you wanted to enforce it, so that they need to confirm they’ve done all this, there are a couple of ways. It can be a customization, or you could use our Quality Inspector tool, which would allow you to do a pre-shipment checklist where you say yes or no to a bunch of items to ensure you’re shipping it the right way. A little customization that pops up and enforces that somebody has confirmed they’ve done it would be an easy thing to do as well.

Ways to Pack

I’ve got all the details about what I’m shipping here. Somebody picked it and dropped it off at my desk, and I now need to package this up. There are a few ways I can do it.

• I could use Quick Label and just say I have two boxes, give me two shipping labels, and off I go.
• If I’m packaging pallets, I can create pallet definitions here and package that all up.
• If I want to do it more visually, I can create a new pallet and license plates, and build up my hierarchical packaging.

A license plate can be a carton, a pallet, a container, whatever you want. I can have a pallet, and on the pallet I could have a bunch of master cartons, and within the cartons a bunch of items. I can build all of that up, and it’s very handy. Sometimes when you’re dealing with EDI you need to send the ASN with that level of detail, so I can come in here and pre-build that definition and reference the way they’ve packaged the pallet ahead of time.

You can also do this on the handheld. If you’re using Warehouse Insight, you can build up those pallets as you’re picking and as you’re physically building the pallets in the warehouse, and scan that to build it up. But if I want to define my hierarchy and pre-build it, I can use this here as well. And again, there’s that simpler pallet packaging where I can create a pallet, pack all these items on the pallet, create another pallet, and so on. If you’re doing LTL, that’s handy. And then there’s Quick Label, which just lets me specify how many boxes I’m going to ship.

Packing by Scanning

Now I’m going to do this the hardest way possible for parcel shipments. I’m going to explicitly tell the system what type of box I’m using and what’s going into each box, and I’m doing this through scanning. Again, you never have to scan if you don’t want to. The value in scanning is that I’m physically verifying everything I’m doing, which means I can’t have mis-shipments anymore. Somebody could easily run out and pick this beige box instead of that beige box and ship the wrong item. That could easily happen, but it won’t happen if I scan that box, because if it’s the wrong barcode on that box, it’s not going to let me ship it, and I’m going to be able to prevent those mis-shipments.

If you don’t have barcodes on your items, that’s fine, there are other ways you can do it. I could simply come in here and pack these items or do the Quick Label and away we go. But to do this through scanning, the first thing I’m going to do is scan a command that says create me a new box. I used a template that says this is my standard size box. I could have 50 different packaging sizes, like pallets or boxes or letters or whatever. This one happens to be 20 by 12 by 8 with a starting weight of zero.

Now I’m going to tell the system what’s going into that box, and I do this by scanning as well. The way I have it set up, every time I scan a barcode it just increments the quantity I’ve packed by one. If I scan that again, it’s going to update that to two. We can also have a prompt for quantities. If I have lot numbers and serial numbers, that’s another advantage of scanning, because I can scan those in here, or I can have a command to select one from a list. If I scan those serial numbers and lot numbers here, I’m always going to know exactly what I’ve shipped. If I was supposed to pick serial number one two three four and I picked five six seven eight, I bring it over, I scan that serial number, and I know exactly what’s being shipped. Or if I was supposed to pick one serial number and I picked a different one, we can generate an error message that says you’re supposed to pick the other serial number, lot number, or package number. That’s the validation.

Reading Weight from a Scale

You’ll notice that this is calculating the weight as I’m packaging it. That’s just an option. Let me also show you how we can read that weight from a scale. I packed two of those, and let’s also pack one of these in that box, so I’ve got these three things packed and I’m ready to go. Actually, I’m going to throw this on a scale, so I’m going to scan a command to read the weight from a scale. I don’t actually have a scale hooked up. If I did, this would have updated that value immediately with the weight from the scale. Because I don’t have a scale hooked up, it’s just asked me to enter the weight manually and away I go. We can connect to pretty much any USB or serial scale out there and read the weight into the system.

Let’s pretend this box is fully packed. All I did there was say I’m using a standard size box. I look at the stuff I’m supposed to pack, I grab a box, I slap it on there, I scan a command that says standard size box, I pick up one of these items in my left hand, I beep it with my right hand, drop it in the box, do the same thing a few times, scan a command to read the weight from a scale, and I’m done. It took a few seconds to do that and I’ve got this box packaged up.

Now that box, we’ll pretend, is completely full, so I’m going to start my next box. Same thing: I tell it I’m using my standard size box and I scan the items going into that box. We’re now fully packed, everything’s done, and I’m ready to go. Again, I could do the get weight and read the weight from a scale or whatever else I need to do here.

Rate Shopping and Generating the Label

Now that I’m fully packed, I want my shipping labels. So I say go out and get me my shipping label. As I mentioned before, because I don’t have the shipping agent set, it goes out and gets me a list of all the shipping agents I have set up. These are all the carriers I have connections to, whether it’s a direct connection to the carrier or it’s going through EasyPost or another API in the system. I can see all of those rates.

Let me talk quickly about what these columns are. Some carriers don’t return a delivery date or delivery days. All of these ones do, but this is all carrier dependent information. This cost is what we’re paying for that shipping. The list rate is what you would be charged if you went to the carrier website, like the FedEx website, and put all this information in without any discounts, so we’re getting a pretty good discount on this. And this column is what we’re charging the customer. Quite often that column is hidden by default on this page, but if I want to see what we’re charging the customer, that’s it there. It looks like they get free shipping for everything on this particular order.

What I would do in this case is choose the carrier I want to use, and away I go. Again, we don’t have to show this, and typically it isn’t shown for parcel shipments, because the carrier is already defined on the sales order, or you have it set up to always choose the cheapest rate and it just grabs the cheapest carrier and nobody even sees the screen. In this case I get to see it based on the way I’ve set things up. I’m going to choose UPS Expedited and hit OK. It takes a couple of seconds in a production environment, and the label is now sitting on my printer.

In my case, I have it set up to pop up the print preview so I can actually see the label. If you’re using our PrintNode connector, which is a cloud print connector, I can have it automatically go to my shipping printer without me touching anything. I will never see anything. As soon as I say I’m using UPS Expedited, or as soon as I say get label, that label shows up on the printer immediately with no extra interaction. That’s if you use our PrintNode or cloud print connector.

On this one, I just have it pop up as a print preview so I can show you what the labels look like. There’s no magic here. We’ve got box one of two and box two of two, and in here where the UPS barcode would be, it shows up. I’m in the test system, of course, so this is a sample label, but this is pretty much exactly what you would see. The nice thing is that this is live. Whatever that tracking number is here is now effectively live within the UPS system or the carrier system. I’ve generated that label, and it’s effectively a live tracking number at that point.

That’s it. I said that was the hardest way possible, and it kind of is, because there’s the most number of steps. But it literally took me maybe 10 or 15 seconds of interaction with the system to validate that everything I packed was correct, to indicate exactly what type of box I’m using and what’s going into each box. Each one of these packages gets its own tracking number as well. So all of that, plus generating labels, was 10 or 15 seconds.

There’s no way you can do that faster. Well, I lie. You can do it faster by using Quick Label, because you just go in there and say I have a standard size box, it’s 5 pounds, give me a label. That takes about five seconds and you don’t have to tell it what’s going into each box. The advantage of the scanning approach is that physical verification of everything you’re doing. But again, I don’t have to do that. I could use a mouse and the keyboard to pack it, or use Quick Label, or whatever else. I know I’ve mentioned that a few times. I just want to get the point across that you do not have to do scanning if you don’t want to. There are a whole bunch of other options for that packaging, including on the handheld devices if you’re using Warehouse Insight.

Shipping Options and Templates

One of the things I didn’t show you is this. There’s a whole bunch of options you can set, and these options can come in based on the customer and the carrier. You can have multiple different templates by customer and by carrier. That means if I’m shipping for this customer on UPS, I use these options, and if I’m shipping for this customer on FedEx, I use a different set of options. Maybe if we’re shipping FedEx we’re using their account numbers, so we’re shipping on the customer account number instead of using our own account. For those customers, whether it’s UPS or FedEx, I can set that up.

These options can be set here at the point of shipment, or they can be templates associated with the customer. You can set whatever you want in here, including placeholders that will print additional information on the carrier label, like the external document number, the purchase order number, the invoice number, or whatever else you want to put on there. We can even do things like print the item number on there. We have people doing high volume, single item shipments who actually use the shipping label as the pick ticket. They grab it, slap the label on, and ship it out the door, and the label acts as their pick ticket.

Hazmat Shipping

One of the questions in the signup was on hazmat. There’s a bunch of hazmat functionality we can do here. There’s limited quantity and excepted quantity and things like that. These hazmat options are often carrier specific and also connector specific. For example, I might choose one of these limited quantity options here, but the API I’m using may not support that particular option. So it is important to understand which APIs support which options.

There are some API providers we use that can take a lot more detail for hazmat. This is the simple hazmat functionality when we’re talking about a basic parcel shipment. If you use our Hazmat Manager, you get a lot more options for hazmat if the carrier supports those options. This is a completely free app from Insight Works for Business Central. You just plug it in with Dynamic Ship, and our support people can help you with that.

Let me show you that quickly. I’m going to jump over into a different company. Hazmat Manager allows you to define all your hazmat classes and a whole bunch of detail around how you need to ship that hazardous material, including things like excepted quantity and limited quantity. Again, not every API provider supports this level of detail, but there are a few that do, and if they do, we can send all of that detail to the carrier and they can manage it. This has been used with UPS for sure, with these types of settings. So if you’re a UPS hazmat shipper, you can use all of these in there. Hazmat Manager is a free add-on you can grab and plug in with Dynamic Ship, assign to all your items, and print your labels from there as well.

LTL Options and Accessorials

While I’m in this company, I’ll also briefly talk about the options. I was looking at the options where you can set adult signature and that kind of thing. If you’re doing LTL, you also have a whole bunch of LTL options. These are all the accessorials and various options you can set.

There was a question about whether the rate that comes back from the carriers includes all the accessorials. It does. It includes anything you’ve specified as an accessorial. The rate that comes back doesn’t typically get broken down by your primary shipping charge, accessorial charges, and surcharges. It doesn’t break it out into that level of detail, because most of the APIs don’t do that. But it will include anything I’ve specified. If I’ve said it’s a construction site and there’s going to be an extra charge for that, it’s going to include that cost in the rate that comes back. There’s a ton of these accessorials and options you can set here, and all of that gets sent to the carrier to include in their quote. There are also various options in here for LTL and full truckload.

SSCC and EDI Labels

There are a whole bunch of questions that have popped up, so let me pause and answer some. There was one about the SSCC process. When we’re talking SSCC, we’re talking about the labels that print for EDI. What happens is that as we’re generating these packages, we can print the label.

By the way, for any of these menu items there’s a command I can scan. You can go in here and print, and it prints out all the barcodes you can use for scanning. There’s a whole bunch of these commands, but basically for every menu item you can scan a command, or type a command up here if you like, and it will execute it. Or you can use the mouse and the keyboard.

This internal package label is typically going to be your SSCC label. It can be anything, though. It could be your own custom address label or your own custom pallet label. There are a few ways we can do that. We have a library of existing trading partner layouts, and I think we have 50 or so that you can use. We also have access to APIs with EDI providers that let us use their library of labels to print as well, and they’ll have something like 100 different labels. So we can print that label from within Business Central.

It’s just a report layout. If there’s a trading partner you use and we don’t have a layout for it, you can go into Word and create a new layout that matches their requirements, and it’s available when we print. You can set up which layout you use based on the customer and the ship-to address you’re shipping to. So the SSCC label is this internal package label, and there are a few different ways you can get it. One is the library of reports that we have available, or you can hook into the EDI provider to get their labels.

Order Ship Express Options

There’s a question on Order Ship Express, asking what options you have in Order Ship Express. It’s very basic. It’s essentially this top section here, a handful of fields. You can go in and install Order Ship Express and have a look. It has a few options like adult signature, third party billing, and that sort of thing. It has much fewer options than what you see in Dynamic Ship, but still enough for basic parcel shipping.

Customizing Shipping Labels

There’s a question on customizing shipping labels. Those labels that come back, like the one I printed for UPS, I did mention you can go in and add information to that label. If you want to customize it further, there are some things we can do. Typically what people will do is print it on slightly larger label stock, and then we can add things to the bottom of the label, outside the main label. We can also get access to what we call the actual format of the label and modify that through a customization if required. So yes, we can customize those labels if necessary. Typically it’s just adding to them, not actually changing the layout of the label itself.

Return Labels and Inbound Shipments

There’s a question on inbound receiving. That’s probably out of scope for this, but I’m going to take a side trip since somebody asked. We can manage inbound shipments as well. Typically Dynamic Ship is used for outbound, where I’m shipping stuff out of my warehouse, but if you want to plan vendor shipments or inbound shipments for yourself, you can, in two ways.

One is a return label for a customer. You ship them something and you want to generate a return label for them to ship it back. I can do that while I’m shipping them a product or replacing their product. There’s an option where I can say also include a return label. It prints out a return label, I put it in the package, and they can ship it back. That return label can be from a different carrier than my primary shipping label. So if they’ve got a problem with the product, I ship them a replacement overnight, but then I send them a USPS return label that’s going to come back in a week, because I don’t really care when it comes back.

For inbound from a vendor, I can use miscellaneous shipments to plan my inbound shipping. This doesn’t let me specify the items, and I’m not necessarily going to tie this to a purchase order. This miscellaneous shipment capability allows me to generate shipping labels or bills of lading and do rate shopping for LTL or parcel without having a document in Business Central. I don’t need a sales order to do an outbound shipment using a miscellaneous shipment.

I can just go in here and say I’m shipping a bunch of stuff to one of my other warehouse locations, or to a specific customer. It brings in the address, and I can change it here. Then all I do is come in and say I’m shipping a package that’s 10 by 60 by whatever, go out and get my rates, and do everything in here just as I would in the Package Worksheet. I don’t need a sales order and I don’t need to list what I’m shipping.

I can do exactly the same thing with inbound. I can bring in a specific vendor, and this is the vendor address information, and indicate what’s coming in and plan the shipping from my side, versus having the vendor plan the shipping. So for inbound, we would use the miscellaneous shipment to do all your shipment planning for your vendors. We can also use it for outbound shipping. If I’m just shipping a forklift battery from this warehouse to the warehouse across town, or across the state or country, I would typically use this, because I don’t want a transfer order or a sales order or anything else. I just want to ship stuff and manage it through my carrier integrations. That’s the miscellaneous shipment. Hopefully that answers the question. If not, fire us an email or go to the website and jump on the chat.

Recording LTL Shipments Without a Carrier Connection

There’s another question on LTL. I’ve been talking about LTL a lot, and we have a whole bunch of different LTL connectors. I think we have about ten different connectors for different LTL carriers and API providers. There are a few that we use more commonly, but there are a whole bunch of different LTL providers out there that we work with, and I think seven or eight direct connections to carriers.

If you don’t have that direct connection to an API provider or a carrier, here’s what that means. I’m in my Package Worksheet here, and let’s bring up that same order I was working on. When I went out and got the rates for that shipment, if I have those connections to those LTL carriers, it brings in the rates from those carrier connections. If I don’t have that, and I’m using a broker or something similar, I’m just going to clear this out.

I have the admin setting, which means I can relabel this package, so I can go out and do a reship even though it generated a label already. By the way, if you’ve generated a label already, you can void that label from within Dynamic Ship and refund the label.

Now it’s doing my rate shop. You’ll notice up here I have this external carrier, and this is what I’d use if I don’t have a connection to an LTL carrier or full truckload carrier that I’m using. I’m going to call my broker or call a carrier, do my email, and then come in and say I used Joe’s Hotshot Service, he’s going to do it faster, it’s going to cost me a hundred bucks, it’s going to be there in a day, and he gave me his tracking number of Joe one two three. What this does is fill in the sales order as if I’d gotten this rate electronically from the carrier. So this freight cost, if I have a rule in there that says we’re going to mark this cost up by 20 percent, is going to add $120 onto the sales order. It’s going to put this tracking number on the sales order. It’s going to put all of this on the sales order automatically. But I do have to manually enter it. So if you don’t have a connection to a carrier through an API, this is what you would do to record your LTL shipments.

Freight Charges on the Sales Order

While I’m here, and I did tell you I have no agenda, I’m going to show you the sales order quickly. This is from when I generated the UPS labels. You’ll notice here that we put the cost of that label on here. So right on the sales order I can see what that shipping cost me and I can see what I’m charging the customer. We have a markup here of 10 percent on that, so I’ve marked up that shipping cost. But if you remember, these guys got free shipping, so it also gave them a 100 percent discount. It did a markup and a discount on the same line. I can also do a fixed price, or a handling charge or surcharge, to calculate this price.

The reason these guys get free shipping is that their order value is over $1,000. I have a rule in there that can apply to a specific customer, a customer group, or everybody. You can do it by customer, customer ship-to address, customer group, and all customers. I’ve said for this customer, if their order value is over $1,000, give them free shipping, and this is how I want it to show on the order. If we go down here, here’s the tracking number. I cleared out the shipping agent earlier, along with the tracking number and everything else.

Customer Notifications and Delivery Status

One of the things I didn’t mention is that when I generated that shipping label, the other thing it did was send out an email to the customer with the tracking information and a link to a page that has your logo, your information, and your images on it. It gives them all the same information as if they went to the carrier website, but it’s branded with your information. They get an email that has your logo on it and all the details. You can set up whatever templates you like for those emails, and then the customer can jump right into the tracking from there.

If you want to see that tracking detail from within Business Central, we also track the delivery status if you want. We can retrieve the delivery status for a shipment periodically. You set it up in the job queue, so it can be every hour, every day, whatever you like. We’ll bring in whether it’s been shipped, whether it’s in transit, whether it’s been delivered, whether it’s been signed off. Whatever the carriers return for the status, we’ll bring back, with any notes associated with it. I’m just looking at one particular package here, but you can get a list of all the packages and see the delivery status on everything you’ve shipped for whatever period of time you want to filter to. So we bring that in automatically, and we’re also providing it in that email to the customer. I was going to show that email, but I’m running out of time. It’s nice, though. If you look on the website, there’s an example of what that email looks like and what the tracking page looks like.

Pricing

Let me jump back into the PowerPoint quickly to cover two last slides, and then I’ll get back to your questions. On pricing, Order Ship Express is free. It’s as simple as that. With Order Ship Express, the default is EasyPost, and actually that’s the only option. When you install Order Ship Express you create an EasyPost account, and again you get 3,000 shipments a month for free, so it doesn’t cost you anything if you’re doing 3,000 shipments a month or less through EasyPost. You can use the EasyPost account for discounted rates for FedEx, UPS, USPS, and that kind of thing. So not only is the app free, you may get better shipping rates than what you have today if you don’t have a discount plan with the carriers you’re using.

With Dynamic Ship, the nice thing is that it’s priced per location, so per physical location you’re shipping from. I don’t care if you have 20 packing stations out there and 20 people using it simultaneously, it’s one cost per location. There are pricing guides on the website. If you go to the Dynamic Ship page, there’s a pricing guide right at the top under pricing details. If you want an exact quote, talk to your partner and they’ll be able to give you a quote based on your specific requirements.

This is the important one: those freight integration providers might have extra fees. I mentioned EasyPost. If you sign up with Dynamic Ship, most people won’t pay anything unless you do more than 3,000 shipments a month, and after that you get a 40 percent discount on their pricing. The LTL providers will have their own pricing, and it’s important that you talk to them and figure out which provider you want to use. If you have an existing one that you’re working with and you’re happy with it, we may have a connector for it, or we may build a connector for you.

Implementation

For implementation, there’s a guide on the knowledge base that walks you through the basic setup. Typically your partner will do it, or we can do it. We have a fixed price implementation project option. You buy that, and it covers the install, the configuration, the training, and the support, everything you need to get up and running and stay up and running. It’s just a one cost type of thing.

If you do need more information, go to Shipping for Dynamics or the main website and you can get whatever details you need there, or contact us on the website and we’d be happy to help you out.