A key feature in an ERP System today is its ability to communicate with other systems. Disparate systems need to speak to 3PL’s, trade EDI data, upload data to other divisions or even legacy systems and the list goes on. Sometimes its cost effective to teach system A to communicate with system B rather than recreate those special features on system B.

When a longtime customer of MIBAR needed to use their NetSuite to send CSV files to a host of 3PLs we looked deep into our bag of tricks to find the answer. We would create saved searches for each CSV, then export and ftp each to selected sites. The problem was you they had no control over the data and could send the same transaction repeatedly. We had to alter our plan to overcome this anomaly.

To do this we built a search exporter to handle the searches. A custom record housed the search metadata. This enabled users to associate a header search, a detail search and destination system ftp information to an export. A suitelet was created so the user could select an export to run and monitor the entire process.

The header search controlled what records got selected. The detail search retrieved the related item information which was necessary to send. This design allowed flexibility and leveraged the powerful search engine built into NetSuite. It also allowed maximum user flexibility in creating searches given each export could have different requirements.

To maximize efficiency asynchronous tasks were used to generate the CSV. When you create a search task the CSV export details are handled by NetSuite server-side processes.  This makes a quick, efficient error free process. The addInboundDependency property was used to add a scheduled script to update the header transactions. Each transaction had its “exported” flag set to avoid processing the same record more than once.

After the update, the ftp module securely moved the data to the destination system using the metadata set up in the export record. All the while the user got status reports of what was happening. A copy of the CSV was saved on the file system and returned to the user for archiving.

Now when searches are executed no order gets processed twice. Partners get the required data in consistent efficient fashion uploaded to their system.

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