How to create provisional shipments

This article assumes that you are familiar with the basic operations on shipments . This article is useful for Receiver and 3PL roles in a community. 

A provisional shipment is a reservation of resources in your warehouse for a carrier or a supplier. You reserve a certain capacity to unload or load a number of packaging units. The carrier or supplier must confirm this reservation. You can set the time that this stakeholder must confirm the reservation for each company. If the reservation is not confirmed before that number of hours before the actual reservation time, we delete the reservation and free the reserved capacity for  other stakeholders. 

A reservation can have a certain recurrency. You repeat this reservation with a certain recurrency by day, week or month. 

When a supplier or carrier wants to book a slot for that certain date, streamliner will automatically propose the first reserved slot for that day. 

Step 1: Go to the 'Shipments' section

Step 2: select the location where you want to create provisional shipments

Step 3: select 'Add prov. shipment in the context menu

Step 4: Creating a provisional shipment

• Select the carrier or the supplier
• Set the zone. The provisional shipment will reserve capacity only in that zone
• Add packaging units. This is not critical if you accept only one truck at the time in this zone. But as soon as you accept multiple trucks at the same moment, you must set the capacity that you want to reserve. 
• Select the date and timeslot
• And you can add a reference if you wish. 

Now you can book the slot. This shipment will appear in your list with a calendar icon. This icon makes it clear that this is a provisional slot. It stays a provisional slot as long as it not confirmed with an order number or a principal and reference. 

Step 5: Creating a provisional shipment with a recurrency

All steps from step 4 are needed, but before you book the slot, you click on 'Recurring shipment' button. 

This is only possible if zone, date & timeslot are selected. 

By selecting 'Approve' you return to the provisional shipment screen and you will see in blue all dates where provisional shipments will be created. 

if you 'Book slot' now, you create '8' provisional shipments . Non working days are not part of the recurrency. 

Attention points:

• The recurrency is lost as soon as the provisional shipments are created. You have to edit them one by one if you want to change something. 
• You are only informed once, if for a certain date the provisional shipment can not be created du to capacity issue. 
• Do not create a recurrency over the 10 weeks. This is to far in the future to be meaningful. This will give you more work when something changes. 
• The maximum duration for a recurrency is set to 180 days. 

Step 6: Control the reservation time

On the company page for each company in your community, you find the switch to delete the provisional shipments and the offset that is used. By default, 24 h before the actual timeslot of the provisional shipment, the reservation will be deleted if not confirmed. This setting must be higher then your freeze time. 

So, you are ready to start with provisional shipments. Enjoy this block of functionality.