I wrote about building an Ecometry Shipping Station on your own over a year ago. A few people have tried building one on their own using this guide, which is great. So I decided when I was going to build two more when we integrated UPS and were given some new Dell computers as part of a UPS subsidy (which was really cool), that I should share my experience again.

Everything worked pretty straightforward like last time, save for that the new computers don’t have PS2 ports, just USB. So our older scanners no longer work with new hardware. The configuration is as follows:

• Dell Optiplex 740 Desktop
• Zebra S4M Direct Thermal Printer
• Mettler Toledo PS60 Scale
• Symbol LS2208 Barcode Scanner

I still had to change the settings on the COM1 port to work with the scale. The settings can be found in my original post here. I also had to set the scale’s protocol to Mettler Toledo, which you can easily do following the instructions that come on the CD with the scale. Thanks to Chuck on the Ecometry Google Group for that tip. You’ll also want to be sure the baud rate and stop bits settings on the scale match up with what you set on the COM port.

The Zebra S4M printer will work just fine with UPS provided labels. If you don’t have those, get direct thermal labels. You don’t need a ribbon (and the printer isn’t configured for one from UPS anyway). Ecometry will tell you that all that works is the Z4M printers, but the S4M printer will work just fine. This is great because it costs about half as much as a Z4M.

And remember, there are no PS2 ports on these newer computer so there’s no support for older scanners, such as the PSC Powerscan PSSR-0000 or PSSR-1000. These just aren’t compatible with USB. You could perhaps get this to work with a PCI add in card such as this one and some AT to PS2 converters, but I didn’t want to spend a bunch of extra money to just hack the thing together. It seemed to be a better idea to just get all new hardware for these.

We’ve been using these new stations for a few days now and they’re working great. Feel free to drop me a line about building these. You can definitely save yourself a bunch of money building these on your own instead of going through Ecometry’s provider, Agilysys.

We recently wanted to get a better handle on shipping packages for YumDrop via USPS. Ecometry has support for USPS, but only using what they call an Indicia Permit stamp. The problem with this is the minimums the USPS requires you to meet in order to use this. You have to ship at least 50lbs or 200 pieces to even qualify to ship this way. You also have to go through a lengthy verification process and drop the packages off yourself. Not ideal.

So some reps from USPS came down to visit and suggested we use Endicia to ship via USPS. Its a low cost, easy to use solution. It’s a monthly subscription program starting at $9.95 and topping out at $34.95 per month. There are no meters to rent and it can run on any computer. All of the software is included with the monthly fee.

Cool! Next step, Ecometry integration. Well, no surprise, there isn’t one from Ecometry directly. So I called our USPS rep and talked to him about solutions. He said he’d call Endicia and see what we could do. Turns out Endicia has an import/export product called Endicia Galaxy that can pull data into Endicia and push it back out to Ecometry. Even better, you can use a bar code scanner to basically scan the barcode on a collate and it will auto-populate the shipping address fields in the Endicia DAZzle postage printing software.

It all basically works through and ODBC connection that you set up as part of the Endicia Galaxy installation program. Galaxy can pull the order and shipment information straight from Ecometry when you scan the package so that it can print the label automatically for you. Really cool!

The one gotcha here is that Galaxy can’t read from multiple tables, which is how Ecometry stores its data. What you can do is set up a SQL View to pull the data from. I found this document in the Ecometry Google Group thread on how to set this stuff up. It’s from Scott Lohmann of republicoftea.com, so I want to give him credit there. You can basically follow this to the T, however…

I did encounter one problem. Scott’s example view SQL code only pulls information from the CUSTOMER’s table. The issue here is if your order has a different ship-to address than bill-to address, then the wrong address gets printed on the label. Laura Smith from swell.com pointed me in the right direction. After you ship confirm a package, it will show up in the MANIFESTENTRIES table. In here will be all of the information regarding the package and where its going. So you can pull the information right from there! You can download a copy of the SQL code for this view here.

Now I’m left with a couple of issues to sort out. First, I want to post the actual shipping cost and any tracking information back to Ecometry. I think you can do this through a SQL view as well, I just haven’t figured it out. Also, it looks like ESM keeps a connection to the shipping scale open, so Galaxy can’t pull the package weight in directly. I have to enter it manually. And lastly, when you scan the package barcode, you have to remove the last digit. Its not part of the order number, but some flag Ecometry puts on the end there. A little annoying, but workable.

All in all, I’d say this works great. Way better than doing it by hand through usps.com or printing postage from a postage meter. You can just generate the labels as you ship confirm packages.

So I’m going to do the best thing I can, and go over exactly how to do it here. This way I will have it documented and anyone else out there in Ecometry land can use it for reference. For the purpose of this example, I’m setting up a miscellaneous (MX) ship method. These same steps can really be followed for any other ship method group, i.e. UPS (UP), FedEx (FX), USPS (PS), etc. Anyway, here goes…

You’ll probably want to just do all of your data entry for the shipping stuff in VisualLink. Gather all of the company/division pairs that you want to set up. Remember, you’ll want to include company 00 and division 00 in your setup as well, just for defaults. Ecometry suggests this in case “something goes wrong” and a ship method cannot be found for your company/division pair. So, if I’m setting up a new MX ship method, say 07, we’d have the following for a company/division 03/31:

With this data in visual link, activate Warehouse Management under Warehousing and Shipping. Go into Ship Methods Entry and enter the information for the company/division/ship method combinations like you see in the table above. Once you’re done, we can move on to the next step.

As a side note, in our setup, I used ship method 07 for USPS Express Mail so we could integrate Endicia with one of our companies (more on that in a future post).

Now you can go into Shipper Data Entry. This is the tricky part. You need to set up the shipper data for each company/division/warehouse/ship method group (you’ll also have to include company division 00/00 as fall back defaults). If you already have miscellaneous ship methods set up, this part is probably done already, as it was for me. If not, you need to provide any shipping account, manifest, or server information required to set up the shipping method. So it would be best to have that all in front of you before you begin.

One other point of note is that even if you don’t use warehouse 01, you need to set it up for each ship method. We’re using warehouse 03 in our example here. So we’d have to set up warehouse 01 and warehouse 03.

Anyway, if I were to have to set this up, I would have used the following table of values to set up my shipper data:

For a miscellaneous ship method group, you can just enter 1 for the Carrier ID and Manifest Numbers. For FedEx, you’d want to enter all of your FedEx account and server information (sometimes you have to enter P in the Carrier ID field to get the right fields to come up.). I’m sure UPS and other carriers are similar to FedEx.

Now, assuming you have all of that set up right, its time to set up Postage and Handling routines. Get our of Warehouse and Shipping and go back to the VisualLink start screen. Under Advertising and Sales, you want to get into Advertising Control. Once there, get into P & H Management. I’ve always wondered why this stuff is here in this module, but I think it has to do with the fact that P&H routines are tied to advertising offer codes.

You’re in P&H Management, so type in your company name. Its time to set up P&H routines, set up shipping zones, and zone charges.

At the P&H Management screen, type in your company then hit enter. Then active P&H Routines at the bottom of the screen.

About 6 months back though, we had a jamming problem with them. With collates coming out of Tray 3, they’d travel through the inside of the printer and jam. We’d have the printers serviced and a couple days later, they’d jam again. Our printer tech pointed out that since the collates are so thick and the long path they have to take through the printer, they’ll be more likely to jam over time. He suggested feeding them through Tray 1, the manual feed tray. Its a straight path through the printer, so there should be less problems. To date, he was right. No jams at all. The one drawback is that we can only feed about 50-100 collates through at a time. This isn’t that big a deal since we only do high volume 2 months out of the year.

Other Ecometry users have claimed success with other printers. I’m not sure what Ecometry’s official support is for them, but I’ve listed them below for others who are wondering the same thing:

• HP 4240N
• HP 9040N (some jamming issues?)
• Ricoh 2090 Copier/Printer
• Kyocera

If anyone else has any success or failures with other printers for printing collates in Ecometry, feel free to email me or post it below so it can be included here for future reference.

I recently got a little fired up (here and here) with Ecometry regarding their support billing cycles, so I came back to this article and figured I’d publish it.

There are many reasons companies stay with old technologies. Sometimes it just works, so its hard to justify change. Sometimes the cost outweighs the benefits of developing a new application. But sometimes, just sometimes, to increase market share and keep existing customers, you have to change. I’m not saying companies like Ecometry will ever disappear, I just think that eventually, something better will come along.

What I will say to that effect is that as time goes on, better solutions come out (read web applications) that can do the same things antiquated systems like Ecometry do but better (Ecometry isn’t the most user friendly application in the world). Older companies are either forced to change or die out because people go elsewhere. Think about it, why is Digital Equipment (DEC) gone? Something better came along. Why don’t we use DOS anymore? Something better came along. I think we’ll start to see more and more of this happen with Web 2.0 applications replacing desktop applications (look at some of the Google applications that have come out that are useful, but not yet as powerful as say Microsoft Office) when its possible for them to have the same usefulness and features their desktop ancestors had.

Eventually, as web applications become more and more powerful, legacy applications such as Office and Ecometry will go the way of the Dodo. This isn’t a knock on Ecometry so much as its an observation on my part as the direction of software these days. More and more powerful applications are being developed for the Web as we bandwidth increases and we start to go more mobile.

I’d like to thank a couple of people for there help right off the bat. Paul, a support engineer from Datalogic/PSC was a big help getting the right interface cable I needed and helping with programming the scanner to read our barcodes properly. Also, Daniel Lively for his suggestions on the Ecometry Google newsgroup. Thanks guys!

Here’s the list of parts I used:

• Dell Optiplex computer
• Zebra Z4MPlus Thermal Printer
• Mettler Toledo PS60 scale
• SIIG Cyber 2S1P (model #JJ-P21012-S6) Dual serial port and Parallel port card
• PSC Powerscan PSSR-1110
• PSC AT keyboard wedge Y cable Model #8-0738-03
• AT to PS/2 adapter
• PS/2 to AT adapter

Pretty much you can hook up the entire thing and it will work. For the scale, you need to set your COM port to the following settings:

• Baud Rate: 9600
• Databits: 7
• Parity: Event
• Stop Bits: 2
• Flow control: X on X off

For programming the scanner, you can find documentation on Datalogic’s website here. The programming guide that I needed for the model scanner I purchased is here. Depending on the scanner model you use, you’ll need a different programming guide so that you can scan the right bar codes for your application. We enabled Code 39 and Code 128 since we scan FedEx bar codes.

A couple of additional notes. I’m not sure I actually needed the SIIG Cyber 2S1P card as I would have had enough ports to hook up all the equipment. It was recommended on the newsgroup to get one for the scale. I was also told an easier setup with the PSC Powerscans is to use PSSR-7000 and a USB interface. They’re really easy to set up I guess. Also, in place of the Zebra Z4MPlus thermal printer, you can supposedly use a Zebra S600 or a S400, which are cheaper.

Most of the parts I sourced on eBay. I think all said and done, we paid less than $1,000 for the entire shipping station. The computer was free as we had one kicking around, but you can use pretty much any computer running Windows 2000 or Windows XP. I just recommend having a bit of memory in it so it isn’t a complete slug. I believe this is significantly less expensive than buying a pre-built shipping station through Agilysys. It’s faster than the one we originally bought from them too!

• Customer Number
• Company Name
• Title
• First Name
• Middle Initial
• Last Name
• Address 1, Address 2, Address 3
• City
• State
• Postal Code
• Country

This was great, until it came time to processes these orders. Now I needed to generate a ship confirm batch file as specified in the Ecometry 7.x documentation. Not wanting to do this by hand either (especially since I’d need to do this on a regular basis) and being a fan of the DRY (Dont’ Repeat Yourself) principal, I extended my little utility to create Ship Confirm Batch files for Format 256. Other formats might be supported later, contact me if you need them, maybe I can help.

So now I have a cool application that will parse these EDI files for me in the formats I need. If you’re interested in getting your hands on it for your own use, I have a download available with the executable. Let me know if you have any issues with it or want to see some new features.