Shipments

Once navigated to the shipment tab, a list of shipments will be shown created under that account.

A record of a shipment has several values: shipment number, type, terminal, total weight etc.

Shipment number

Each shipment needs a number. Shipment type AWB needs a fixed format (according to Air Waybill).

Other shipment types do not have any restrictions and the system is capable of generating a shipment number itself. The shipment number needs to be added to the manifest file.

Shipment type

Shipment can have several types. Only the valid ones will be configured for use for each client. This is based on what and how will be shipped.

AWB - The main shipment type is AWB. As mentioned before, with this type the shipment numbers needs to be in a specific format, corresponding to the Air Waybill document. This shipment will be arriving by plane

CMR - goods by road

Courier

Labels - label type shipment is meant only for getting labels before the actual shipment creation. In a lot of cases the client will need the parcel labels before creating the shipment, so they could sort&pack parcels into the bags. After this the client can be sure which parcel will be in which bag and the bag-parcel connection can be added later to the actual final manifest file.

Most of the information for each shipment will be compiled in manifest files, which include information about bags, parcels and items inside the parcels.

Once signed in, and account context is selected, in order to upload manifest file, user needs to follow these steps:

• Click "New Shipment" button
• In the pop-up dialog, choose new shipment type (AWB, CMR, etc), terminal and manifest level (parcel-level or bag-level manifest)
• In case the type is AWB, the shipment number needs to have a fixed format and a valid airway bill number. For other types of shipments, the system is capable of generating a shipment number (or the user can add one manually).

• Once the shipment is created, the user will be in the "Manifest files" tab of this shipment. This is where the "Upload file" button is located. First make sure that the shipment number matches "Way bill" column in the manifest.

• Click "Upload file" button, select the file for upload. 
• File processing is performed asynchronously in the background
• To follow processing status, press "Validate" button
  • If file processing is in progress, "Processing" badge is displayed
  • Once processing is completed, potential processing errors or warnings are displayed in "Status" section.
  • Clicking on the red error icon will display the reasons like:
    • ArrivalOn: must be specified
    • ArrivalWeight: must be specified
    • ArrivalBags: must be specified

The weight in the arrival info should contain the total weight of the shipment including pallets and bag weights. This is the weight that is indicated also on transport documents like air way bill.

After the first validation, in case there was no issues processing the manifest file, the system will calculate the weight of the shipment in the status section and also display the amount of distinct bag codes. The amount of bags in the arrival info should match the total bags in the status section.

• After the arrival info has been added (and in case there were no other errors), clicking on the validate button will clear the error.
• Once validation is done, press button "Submit"

There are two other errors, which could appear in that list, not connected to the arrival info:

• One or more bags has errors.
• One or more parcels has errors.

If there is an error on one parcel, the bag in which the parcel is located, will get an error as well since all the parcels in it are not cleared.

So if there are two errors indicating problems on bag and parcel level, check the lower level: the parcels.

To do this, navigate to the "Parcels" tab of the shipment and filter out parcels with errors.

• Once again, clicking on the red error icon will display the error message.

  The error can vary based on the situation.

  One error could be that the e-mail and phone number is missing, in which case, either must be added to send out that parcel.

  1. There are several ways to add this data. If there are only a few errors about parcel data, it's easier to just filter out the errors like above and go through each parcel by clicking on the pencil logo.

  This will open up a drawer window with the parcel data. Fill in the missing receiver information and save.

For exporting, click on the burger menu button next to the submit button and choose "download resulting file".

This will open up a drawer window with the filters.

For solving errors, we only need the parcels which have errors or warnings. (Note: warnings are there to draw attention to something, while errors need solving.)

If all filters have been chosen, click "download", add the missing data there and upload that manifest. The system will process that manifest and read the changes in.

Note: Please do not delete the first manifest, just upload the second one as well. Since in this case only the erroneous parcels will be in the file, the system will just check for the changes.

There will be cases where some important receiver information will be missing and the shipment needs to be sent out before getting to update that parcels information. For these cases there is an option to take this parcel out of the shipment, both physically and from the system - it's called "cancel parcels with errors". 

Clicking on this will cancel all parcels that still have errors. After doing it, the parcel number will be changed - since this order is not shipped out this time, this specific Client ID/Sender Parcel Nr can be used in the future when it's finally being shipped out. A suffix will be added to the parcel number for these parcel records.

There can also be other various errors that are not about the manifest or shipment data. In this case please contact PostPlus IT.

After the shipment has been submitted the parcel numbers and labels are already generated.

Resulting file will have the connections between the Sender parcel number (Client ID) and the newly generated parcel numbers. To get the excel file with all this information, please choose "Download resulting file" from the burger menu again, only this time do not edit the settings (leave everything checked). The system will provide the excel file with all the data from manifest file with the newly generated parcel numbers.

To get the parcel labels, navigate to the burger menu again and choose "Download prints".  This will open a drawer window with filtering options. 

The most important filter is "Labels" where either "PostalLabel" or "ExtProviderLabel" will be provided.

Postal label as the name states is a label for a parcel that will be sent via postal channels. 

ExtProviderLabel is the label that will be provided from the non postal partners (DPD, Bring, Helthjem etc).

There are other filtering options provided, which based on the customers requirements, might be useful. For example, a two-letter-country code can be specified to only fetch labels for a specific country in that shipment.

Shipment documents are generated automatically after shipment submit where applicable. When the shipment is submitted, the validate button will change into "Refresh". It will take a second or two for the system to start generating the documents, but once it has and the "refresh" button is clicked, the "Processing" badge will be displayed. Give the system a bit of time to work on the documents and click refresh again - if the processing badge has disappeared, the documents are ready to be downloaded.

To download the documents, navigate to the "Download all documents" button in the menu options. The system will provide a zip file with the documents.