Anyone familiar with integrating UPS Worldship?

Question

I've just been tasked by my boss to implement in a week a way for a remote shipper to be able to access our system and obtain orders they need to process, and print a packing label from UPS Worldship.

This remote office isn't part of our business; they would be accessing our systems via a web front end (what amounts to an extranet) - on our end we would basically have to mark orders that they need to ship, and export this to a batch job or something that they can pull down and insert into their version of Worldship, but be able to look up orders by their order number (which we assign).

Now, I've never done anything with Worldship. The best way I can think of doing this would be to give us a utility to mark orders as shipping from this location, turn the order data into some kind of XML format and write it to a file on the server. At some point there would be a job to transfer it (FTP?) to their servers, and they would have to initiate an import/map into worldship. They would then need to process the order and give us back an XML file containing the UPS tracking numbers so we can load them into our system. I have absolutely no idea how Worldship works or how I can map fields to it, since it's perfectly feasible that a single address would be associated with more than one order - my boss wants them to be able to use Worldship to pull our order info by the order number.

I really have no idea at all where to start with this thing - it sounds impossible from what he's saying he wants to accomplish, but he's the kind of person who thinks it's "not that hard to do".

The current site is written in VBScript although I can also use .NET if I wanted to.

Answer 1

I had some experience with worldship. The first thing you need to do is install it on some machine you are using for development.

Probably the best advice I can give is to farm this out. There are probably vendors that are certified for UPS.

What you are looking for is definitely doable, but might be a challenge to get working in a live system in a week.

You seem to have the right ideas from what I can tell - you have to set up some sort of mapping from worldship to import/export to your system.

If outsourcing is not an option I would break it down into steps.

You need to ask your supplier/remote shipper what they need from you. Then you need to determine how to get each order from worldship. You need to process those orders and send them to your remote shipper and they need to send that back to you or upload to worldship

There is some mapping tool inside worldship, but it was a hassle. Once that is done it is fairly straightforward. their tech support was ok from what I remember.

Again, best advice: give this to someone who does it all the time. It will be worth the money.

EDIT:

I apologize for the very generic answer and lack of details. I only worked with it briefly for about 2 weeks a few years ago and what I remember is that it is a huge application and very slow to load. It does lots of things. But the only thing I can definitely say for certain is to get an expert/someone who has worked with it before to set up what you need.

You can play with it yourself for a while, but you're probably not going to want (or be ready) to go on production system with it soon by yourself.