1. General.

Streamliner is a B2B platform, bringing companies together to collaborate on the inbound supply chain.  For more info see our website www.streamliner.cloud or consult our knowledge base on support.streamliner.cloud  

A user in your company will be invited to onboard your company in a streamliner community as principal.  

This miniguide describes the following steps

• Book an appointment in name of your carrier to deliver in DC of the 3PL
• What if you want to book outside the offered availability
• Centralize communications for any question

This miniguide is one of the 4 mini guides that are available to support your use of the Streamliner platform. Read more in the following mini guides

• Onboard as principal
• Book an appointment to deliver goods (this one) 
• Involve a carrier and follow-up
• Collaborate on the reception of goods

Prerequisites

• Be invited by your 3PL to participate in his 3PL community

2. Prepare your company. 

Before we start booking, we show you how to set some defaults. Enter the 3Pl community, go to the companies page and select your own company. 

You can set your default pallet type, default truck and default carrier if you wish. This makes it more easy to book shipments. 

3. Book a slot. 

Go to the Dashboard page, enter the Streamliner application inside the community of your 3PL.  It’s the yellow plugin on the dashboard screen:

When you enter Streamliner you see transport orders and shipments. If there are transport orders, by default screen of transport orders will be opened. 

3.1. Shipment overview. 

This is your main overview screen with all shipments that are placed. As a principal you can add a shipment. You can do this by clicking on "Add shipment" in the top right corner. 

When you click on "Add shipment" a screen like this should appear on your screen. 

Fill in all the blank spaces and click on a date. After you filled in your detail, you can select a date to book a slot.

When you selected your zone of operation, the location, your carrier, the delivery type and the packaging reference and volumes, Streamliner will suggest an available time slot for the date that you selected.  Streamliner will present you the first possible slot and will increase the N° of slots based upon the packaging units you will ship 

It is very important that you add a method of packing, otherwise you can not book your slot. Streamliner calculates the length of the slot based upon the type and N° of packaging units. 

Congratulations you just booked your first shipment. 

What information is available: 

If you click on the Shipment, you can see additional details:

• Start hour and duration
• Time of the registration points
• More information about the needed capacity to unload
• Carrier
• Pallets and parcels
• Issue management
• Attachments
• History
• Comments   

A click on a shipment line will open the detail of that shipment Make your self familiar with the filters, search functionality and the information on detail pane. One of the most innovative features is the possibility to communicate within the community. Simply start a discussion about this shipment in the right pane to centralize ALL communications and avoid point-to-point emails. An email will be sent automatically to the concerned persons of the 3PL and vice-versa. 

On the top left you can see the start hour, it is very important that you register at the desk with your shipment number before this hour. 

3. What if you want to book outside the offered availability.

When you select a time slot where one of the rules is not respected, the time slot turns into a red time slot and a warning is shown which rule(s) that are not respected. 

The most common issues are the following: 

• Time window to deliver is not respected
• A time slot is chosen outside opening hours
• There are no resources available
• The slot is already fully booked
• ...

Please select another date/time to book a slot. Depending on the configuration the 3PL did, the 3PL will allow you to book a slot with warnings or not. If you persist to book the slot, a message is sent to the 3PL asking to approve the time slot. So Streamliner can not guarantee that this slot will be approved. Your 3PL can deny or approve your proposal. 

4. Centralize communication. 

You can, at any moment, place comments or pose questions regarding the shipment. Streamliner will send an email with a hyperlink to the persons who are responsible for the follow-up. See user management to accept the notifications of Streamliner

This is how you can centralize all communications regarding an order in Streamliner to keep track of all issues, remarks or whatever. 

Please consult the knowledge base for more in depth articles. Good luck and happy visibility.