Client Overview

The client is the primary postal operator of USA, which provides services such as courier express, freight forwarding and logistics. The client has divided its range of services into three main categories: Transaction Mail service for transmission of any paper document, domestic and international Parcel service, and Direct Marketing service for addressed and unaddressed targets.

Business Challenge

The client needed to integrate Shipment Tracking application with Salesforce.com’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution to create and retrieve shipment orders within Salesforce.

The objectives of the project are as follows:

• Integrate shipment-tracking application with Salesforce

• Create shipment order from within Salesforce

• Retrieve shipment order in PDF format within Salesforce

• Create an email template to send shipment details to the customers

Technical Requirements

• Visualforce

• Apex

Solution Strategy

• Eternus Solutions reviewed the business objectives and worked with the client to implement a Salesforce CRM solution to create and retrieve shipment orders within Salesforce, leveraging Force.com’s Apex and Web services as the implementation technology stack.

• The shipment tracking application was integrated with Salesforce through the REST API web services. Eternus Solutions consultants created a custom button by customizing Case page layout to redirect shipment creation requests to the shipment tracking application.

• On submission of creating a shipment request, a user would send shipment details such as origin and destination postal codes, requested shipping services and shipping product characteristics to the shipment tracking application. This action would call the create shipment process of the shipment tracking application through the REST web services. The shipment tracking application would respond to the request and send the corresponding shipment order PDF to the user through the integrated web services. The user can email the received shipment order PDF to the customer through which the customer could track shipment status.

Solution Components

• Customization of existing standard objects viz. Case to create shipment within Salesforce

• Use of apex classes to parse the XML response received from the shipment tracking application

• Use of REST web services to call the create shipment process of the shipment tracking application

• Creation of email templates to send the shipment details to the customers

Development Methodology

• Development and testing on the Developer Sandbox and moving to the Production Org

• Extensive use of apex classes, REST web services and custom buttons

• Deployment plans and change sets to deploy the application once completed

• Development using SFDC standards and best practices

• Tracking through weekly timesheets and status calls