Shipping application help

We have 80 warehouses across the country. What we'd like to implement is a shipping routine that will determine the warehouse that will generate the cheapest shipping cost to our customers.

I've thought of snagging a table of zipcodes and their latitude/longitude, and generating a distance measurement for that, to see which is closest. That's pretty easy to do. Then someone suggested that if a customer is on a "shipping zone" border, we might prefer to ship from a further warehouse in the same shipping zone rather than a closer warehouse that crosses shipping zones.

Do any of you implement this kind of thing? Where do you get your data to populate in oracle for zipcodes and coordinates? Do any of you implement the zone concept? Do the major shipping companies use the same zones?

If anyone can give me some guidance, I'd appreciate it... Received on Wed Jan 08 2003 - 15:05:52 CET