Let’s address the elephant in the room. Disconnected processes are really bad for business with 46% of business leaders claiming they impair their ability to plan, forecast, and budget because of a lack of visibility. Many processes are complex with intricate details managed by multiple people using disjointed technologies. While that statistic isn’t all that surprising (as we said, it’s a big elephant), it can cause significant growth pain to a business.
This was our team’s motivation behind integrating SYSRPO’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution with the well-known FedEx and UPS delivery service systems. Our goal was to give SYSPRO customers the ability to streamline, unify, and optimize their processes.
Automation is the Cool Kid on the Block
Automation increases productivity through end-to-end management of repetitive, laborious, manual tasks. Businesses today are expected to do more with less, and the COVID-19 pandemic only amplified this. Automation brings everything together with 97% of businesses feeling that it’s important to the future success of their companies. We couldn’t agree more and it’s exactly why we brought these separate systems together: to enhance business performance and provide a continuous workflow.
Working Seamlessly Together
The smart FedEx and UPS API integration is built specifically for calculating rates and validating addresses within the SYSPRO ERP system. Without the FedEx and UPS integration, SYSPRO clients would have to exit the system during the order entry process to get shipping rates. With the integration, our SYSPRO clients simply select a button during the order entry process.
Let’s dive into the details of how this works. Within the Sales Order Entry screens, we built the address validation to allow the end user to ensure the Shipping Address is valid using an external FedEx or UPS API integration tool before the order is sent to the warehouse for picking, packing, and shipping. Think of APIs as a bridge connecting separate systems. They are a common tool in business with nearly 90% of developers utilizing them in some capacity.
Before the integration, staff would often get errors when trying to ship or calculate tax. When you’re able to validate an address during order entry, you can catch & resolve many errors at an early point in the process, rather than later, which comes with costly correction fees. The address validation solution ensures our SYSPRO clients won’t incur additional fees from the carrier.
In addition, if the client is integrated with Avalara Tax, the solution will make sure the invoice will have the correct address on it for accurate tax rate calculation.
The Key to Efficiency and Productivity
This new integrated process improves the entire workflow and increases staff efficiency by taking up to several minutes less per order, depending on the complexity. The ability to integrate systems optimizes teams’ performance and the centralized platform improves communication throughout the organization and with external partners. In this case, our helpful allies FedEx and UPS.
For a company processing numerous SYSPRO orders every day, the time savings can be substantial. Then there are, of course, fewer data entry errors to worry about too, since staff are not manually entering data into SYSPRO. We all make errors, but if they’re costing businesses over $600 billion each year, we need to do something. Merging disjointed systems and processes using the FedEx and UPS API integration, as well as employing automation tools, is one way to combat and lower expensive (and unnecessary) data entry errors.
If you’re not completely sold yet on the advantages that automation can bring to your business, like where you can employ automation to receive the most bang for your buck, or if you still have some questions on our integration tool for SYSPRO ERP with FedEx and UPS, don’t hesitate to talk to one of our SYSPRO team members. Working together (such as how SYSPRO, FedEx, and UPS do), we can help you build a better business.
