Overview

RSI Pro (RSI) is in the business of manufacturing of Ink-Jet printing systems and marketing them. The company has aggressive growth plans, adding a new branch office location every year and increasing the product portfolio by 20% every year. RSI has an engineering team of 6 designers and 2 engineering centers.

Challenge

RSI Pro required a tool to track the packages they ship via UPS and a tool to calculate the cost of shipping packages using UPS.

Solution

PositiveEdge created a library of tools that RSI Pro can integrate into their existing Accounting and Sales applications.

The library makes use of web based services provided by UPS to track packages that were shipped using UPS. One of the tools allows the Accounting and Sales Application to batch Package Tracking IDs and request for their status. The tool also establishes a secure connection with the UPS server using HTTPS protocol to transmit the requests. Upon receiving the responses from the UPS server, the library will split the message and provide all the information as properties to the calling application.

The data thus available is used by the Accounting and Sales Application to update the order status on that system. This proved to be valuable for the Customer Service Representatives in answering customer calls inquiring about the status of their order.

The library also has a tool to figure out the shipping cost for a package based on the destination, weight and the mode of shipping. This again is used in the same fashion as the tool that tracks packages. All the information is collected and the UPS server is contacted to obtain real-time costing information. This proved to be valuable to give the customers accurate shipping cost information.

Technologies

MS Visual Basic 6.0, MS XML library.