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Cutoff time and SLA
Every allocated sales order gets a ship at: the moment it should leave the warehouse, which is the next carrier pickup it can still make. Boxture calculates it from the cutoff time, the carrier pickup time, the location's working days and holidays. A second mechanism, the SLA days, decides how early orders with a future ship date are allocated.
Ship at drives the daily planning in the warehouse:
- the orders overview, pick lists and shipments all show Ship at, and the shipments overview is sorted by it;
- a pick list's ship at is the earliest ship at of its orders;
- pick list plans can select orders with the rules Ship at and Ship at time, for example to release a wave of everything that must go with today's pickup.
The settings involved
| Setting | Default | Can differ per | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cutoff time | 13:00 | location, business model, shipping method | The latest allocation time for an order to be shipped the same working day, in the location's local time. |
| Pickup time | 17:00 | location, carrier, service type | The time the carrier collects shipments, in the location's local time. Used as the time part of ship at. |
| SLA days | 0 | business model, shipping method | The agreed maximum number of working days between allocation and shipping. |
| Working days | location | The days of the week the location works. |
Holidays are maintained under Admin › Holidays (see Holidays). A holiday has a start and end date and applies either to the whole account or to one location.
A working day is a day that is one of the location's working days and does not fall within a holiday of the account for all locations or for that location.
How ship at is calculated
Ship at is calculated each time a sales order is allocated, as soon as anything on it is allocated. Boxture takes the moment of allocation, in the time zone of the location:
- Pickup day. If the allocation day is a working day, that day; otherwise the next working day.
- Cutoff check. Compare the allocation time with the cutoff time on the allocation day:
- allocated at or before the cutoff time: ship at is the pickup day at the pickup time;
- allocated after the cutoff time: ship at is the next working day after the pickup day, at the pickup time.
When an order is unallocated so that nothing is allocated anymore, its ship at is cleared. It is calculated again at the next allocation.
When the order is packed, the shipment takes over the order's ship at.
Examples
Location working days Monday to Friday, cutoff time 13:00, pickup time 17:00, no holidays:
| Allocated | Ship at |
|---|---|
| Tuesday 10:30 | Tuesday 17:00 |
| Tuesday 13:00 | Tuesday 17:00 |
| Tuesday 14:15 | Wednesday 17:00 |
| Friday 15:00 | Monday 17:00 |
| Saturday 11:00 | Monday 17:00 |
| Saturday 14:00 | Tuesday 17:00 |
With a holiday on Monday, the Friday 15:00 order would get Tuesday 17:00.
INFO
The cutoff check uses the time of the allocation day, also on non-working days. That is why an order allocated on Saturday afternoon moves one working day further than one allocated on Saturday morning.
Different cutoff and pickup times
Because the settings can be keyed, you can model several carriers and services in one location:
- set an earlier Cutoff time for a shipping method whose carrier picks up early, together with its Pickup time for that carrier;
- give B2B orders a different cutoff time than B2C orders using the business model key.
The cutoff time is looked up for the order's location, business model and shipping method; the pickup time for the order's location and its shipping method's carrier and service type.
SLA days and future ship dates
Sales orders can have a Ship earliest on and a Ship latest on date, for example for pre-orders or planned deliveries. When neither is filled in, Boxture sets ship earliest on to the day the order is created.
For automatic allocation, these dates and the SLA days decide when the order may be allocated. An order is automatically allocated in a location only from:
- its ship earliest on date minus the SLA days (counted in working days), or
- its ship latest on date minus the SLA days (counted in working days), whichever is reached first.
Before that day, automatic allocation leaves the order alone, so stock is not reserved too early. The scheduled auto-allocation, which runs every 30 minutes, picks the order up once the day has come and stock is available. Allocating manually is not restricted by these dates.
Example
SLA days = 2, working days Monday to Friday. An order with ship earliest on next Thursday is automatically allocated from next Tuesday (two working days before Thursday). Once allocated, it gets a ship at as described above, for example Tuesday 17:00 if allocated before the cutoff time on Tuesday.
WARNING
The SLA moves allocation earlier, so the calculated ship at can be earlier than the ship earliest on date. In the example above the order may be shipped on Tuesday, before the requested Thursday. Set SLA days to 0 if orders must never ship before their ship earliest on date.
Related pages
- Holidays: maintaining holidays per account or location.
- Locations: the location's time zone.
- Allocation: manual and automatic allocation.
- Shipping settings and Carrier settings.