Business Central customization and integration for a digital freight forwarder
Challenges
Cooperation between Forto and Global Mediator began one year ago, with further activities planned or ongoing. The digital freight forwarder needed to enhance business processes with a powerful ERP integration. Along with the customer, our engineering team defined the following milestones as the top priority:
• Upgrade the on-premise Microsoft NAV 2018 to the latest Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central version.
• Integrate the Forto transport management system with Business Central to accelerate and automate business activities.
• Provide upstream quality assurance to ensure smooth operations of the solution and prevent possible bug fixes after the development phase.
Alexander Fischer
Director Finance Digitalisation
"Forto needed a powerful ERP migration that could support the complexities of our global business. Global Mediator was strongly committed to understanding and delivering against our requirements to deliver the best possible outcome."
Solution
The dedicated team supported Forto with migration to a new ERP system - Business Central 15. The integration was designed to support further upgrades to BC18.
01.
The success of the complex integration of the Forto transport system and Business Central has enabled Forto to further optimize the efficiencies of its business processes and better manage complex billing scenarios:
• The ERP and TMS systems were integrated via a two-way API connection to drive new order processing efficiencies in sales and purchase activities. To optimize processes and minimize manual interaction, ongoing activities are automatically pushed to the ERP system.
• The team customized Continia Document Capture to automate document creation and improve the visualization of the documents with PDF Viewer according to the customer’s requirements.
• To make payment procedures more accessible for the users, the team customized the Business Central UI for OPplus making it more customer-oriented.
02.
Global Mediator engineers worked to maximize memory and database use efficiency.
03.
To drive quality upstream and eliminate code corrections on the next steps, the QA team joined the project from the beginning.
• Testing Business Central objects customization: to secure a cost-effective, bug-free and timely development process, test engineers conducted integration/performance/regression testing to align the system with MS BC standards.
• A critical step - the SMTP configuration for email accounts (Outlook, Gmail) - was initiated, implemented and tested by the team to verify the BC scheduled emailing for orders processing.
• The team provided bilingual English- and German-language report testing.
• The QA engineers verified API integration capabilities.
• As a part of the team's commitment to the project, the test engineers had access to the Visual Studio Code repository to view and analyze the code when necessary.
Technologies behind the project
A snapshot of what we leverage to deliver best-of-breed solutions
Alexander Fischer
Director Finance Digitalisation
“We see Global Mediator as a digital-savvy and reliable partner whose suggestions and initiatives are trustworthy and well-reasoned. Our next mutual step is moving to the Business Central cloud version to enable scalable, secure and state-of-the-art finance solutions.”
Impact
About our customer
Forto is a leading digital freight forwarder that was founded with the vision to deliver a highly transparent, frictionless, and sustainable digital supply chain. Leading manufacturers and e-commerce brands are among the 2.500 customers using Forto’s digitally-focused offerings as part of their supply chain delivery. Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, the company currently has 11 locations across Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.forto.com
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