Sage 100

What is the current favorite for a shipping program with Sage 100? We have had mixed experiences with both StarShip, Ship Gear and SmartLinc. What do you guys recommend? How about a budgeting tool?

I sat through a couple demos of Smartlinc. Cost was the issue as well as the recent sale of the company to EFI (Company involved in digital printing). Though customers sometimes complain about V-Tech/Starship that's still the shipping solution I see and hear the most about. For a while people were writing their own integrations to FedEx and UPS. That seems to have quieted a little bit.

The few folks I've heard that have worked with SmartLinc wouldn't do it again.

Hi Kate! How dare you not lead with *your* favorite shipping integration product from ASI!!! :-) (Shipping Integration is the name for anyone not familiar with it) In all seriousness, I think it really depends on how complex the shipping requirements are or will be. If it is simply speeding up the process and the customer knows which carrier they will be using to ship which orders/packages, then using the ODBC connection to pull data from MAS into the shipping software and then exporting the shipping information to a file for import back into MAS works really well. The gotcha here might be the ODBC connection - can they use it in their environment or will they need a workaround (i.e. exporting all of the sales order information to an access database or excel file to then import into the shipping software, etc.). I think Ship Gear is similar to our product, but I have never implemented it. Starship was (and I think it still is) a great solution for anyone wanting to shop rates between carriers while still being a fairly simple, straightforward small parcel shipper. It's not too terribly expensive, but it is twice the cost of our solution. SmartLinc is very expensive, and I never got anywhere with it even with some of our very large customers with LTL needs. It looks really good, and it shows well.

My favorite is still StarShip. The BOI is a nice tool and my clients like the shipping rules.

My vote is for Starship. One thing I recently learned about Smartlinc is that they use additional 100 seats. Starship does not.

V-Tech will be at MOTM next week