Western Carriers has updated the webservice interface for both NJ and CA.   The changes made include the following:  

1) The ability to transmit orders that are not processed in the system immediately, but rather saved in the project I website as "saved for later" orders.  These can then be manually reviewed by website users and placed on the Project I site.  

2) Improved error codes.  The error codes that are returned from the web service have been standardized and now include an error code at the beginning to help with programmatically handling error codes returned from the web service interface.  These are documented in the updated documents listed below.  

Updated documentation for the webservice interface

We....

Western Carriers has developed a new version of its web services to better allow our customers to integrate their software with our services. We have both simplified the use of and extended the capabilities of the web services in this new version, and documentation has been improved as well. Placing invoiced orders is now supported with no need to enter data via our website. Our sample application has been updated to Visual Studio 2008 and can easily be converted to Visual Studio 2010 or 2012 for customers using those versions. Additionally, the sample application will now read the security key from a configuration file which can be modified by the user, allowing it to be used as a standalone application if desired, or to easily test out the web service functionality with no development required. Please contact us if you wish to test or implement this functionality. Additionally, curr....

There are many enhancements coming to the project I functionality. To make it more readable, we are breaking these changes up into three sections, the first of which deals with the Address Book.

We are changing the address book functionality in a couple of ways. We have heard that you often add the same carrier and comments to a particular address. As a result of this, we have added three new fields to the address book: Carrier, comments line 1 and comments line 2, as well as moved the fields and links around to make it clearer what they do and what is saved. To more clearly delineate this change, the “Select from Address Book” link has moved above all the fields that are filled in when you

Secondly, we have changed the real time inventory by product display to more accurately display the unshipped allocation of your inventory.

We have broken out the orders that are placed against a particular product and are now displaying the allocation in more detail. As you can see below, there are now 4 lines for the allocated inventory, two for allocated taxpaid inventory and two for allocated bonded inventory.

The details button will still display all of your orders for the selected product.

As the last installment of the recent changes, we have changed the place orders item entry page to display the inventory allocation for the entered products in order to assist our customers in preventing over-allocation of their inventory.

As you can see below, we have added two new columns in the item grids below: Cases Available and Bottles Available. This information should help you to see what items are available to place orders against.

We at Western Carriers have been busy over this summer to try to improve and streamline the process of placing orders on our website, to make it faster and easier than ever for you. This means that there are a few new substantial changes that you will see in the coming weeks. We are pretty excited about them, and we hope you are too!

First, all of our pages have been better optimized for display on smaller screens to enable you to place orders without having to scroll back and forth to see the entire screen.

Secondly, the address book has been revised so it is no longer always at the bottom of the screen. To access the address book, you now simply click on the “Select from

In order to better serve our customer’s reporting needs, Western Carriers is releasing a new scheduling option for reports. Scheduling a report will allow you to define the report parameters and automatically run and deliver the report using a schedule that best suits your needs

Instructions on how to use this new reporting feature will be available when this option is made available on our site.

Starting today, Western Carriers is offering email notification when orders that are placed on the website are shipped from our warehouse. These emails will be sent to the email address (or addresses) that is specified in your company profile. If you would like to have multiple email addresses notified upon shipment, simply enter those emails in the textbox separated by commas. This address can be set by your customer administrators and will be applied across all web placed orders, regardless of who placed the order initially.

It will appear similar to the confirmation email seen below:

Western Carriers has several website changes that are going to be rolled out soon to help you just in time for the busy fall season. First, we are implementing shipped order confirmations that will allow you to receive an email when an order that was placed through our “Place Orders” website application has shipped and 2) we have revised the layout of all our reports to be more user friendly and readable. These two changes will be available on the 30th.

A sample of the new reporting format is shown below:

and the old format so you can see the changes:

We have already implemented a new version of “Place Orders” for our Western Carriers customers. We feel this new version is easier to use. Users can now type ahead and tab through fields without waiting for the site to load product information. Invalid product codes are highlighted with a red “Invalid Product Code” message in the description area. These need to be corrected before you can continue to the next page.

This change will be implemented on the Western Wine site soon. As always, any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

In response to customer requests, Western Carriers will be enhancing the place orders system to add new functionality and make the order processing system easier to use. The place order screen will be more intuitive, changing the size of the fields to better reflect their maximum sizes, and modifing the order validation to be more intuitive and easier to use. Now all the error messages will be displayed at the top of the screen and shown together, instead of being displayed one at a time. Going forward, order numbers will be limited to letters, numbers, hyphens and forward slashes. Also, we will be implementing a new calendar box for the requested ship date field. You will see a calendar to choose a day as well as type directly into the box if you know the date you want. To use the actual calendar display, simply click on the arrow....

Western Carriers, in our continuing effort to serve our customers better, is going to update the Inventory Balances report this coming Sunday – June 28th. The report will be changed to better reflect your available inventory balances by showing the amount of inventory that is allocated to orders not yet shipped. With this change, you can see at a glance inventory that is available for order without looking at the inventory inquiry screen online for each product.

This version of the report is already available for our Western Wine customers. We will continue to improve our website to better serve you, our valued customers.

At Western Carriers and Western Wine Services, we continue to learn, invest, and create policies to reduce our carbon footprint and help the global environment.

Western Wine Services and SPG Solar have installed a record-setting 707 kW solar photovoltaic (PV) system at our location in Napa. The positive impact on the global environment of our solar panel project is far-reaching. Our system produces enough energy to power 283 California homes each year and prevents 1,655,672 lbs. of carbon dioxide from being emitted into the atmosphere annually. It takes 626 acres of pine forest to absorb this much CO2 from the atmosphere each year. This is equivalent to removing 1,630 passenger cars from the road or offsetting 17,470 barrels of oil. You may find more information here.

Solar panels

We also started an aggressive banding and recycling program in our warehouses and offices. We are now recycling all cardboard, plastic, stretch wrap and paper in our facilities.

Plastic Compacted		Banded Cardboard

Recently, a nice customer, Jeannie Bobick of Empson USA, suggested that we should look for a greener alternative to using styropack for our air shipments. After much research, learning, and investment we are transitioning to a pulp paper based product which can be recycled. Thank you Jeannie!


Pulp Paper Product

We are committed to improving our policies to reduce our impact on the environment. We welcome any suggestions from our customers, and together we can work to preserve the planet we all share.



Michael Hodes (and his 2004 Prius)