Loading and Unloading

This guide will help you through the end-to-end process of the loading and unloading of jobs.

Overview

There are many different types of transport tasks typically undertaken:

• Deliveries from the transport depot to a customer location.
• Collections from a customer location to a transport depot.
• Direct deliveries from a customer location to another customer location.
• Trunking or shunting between transport depots.
• Multi-legged deliveries from one customer location to another, through several regional depots.

Each type of movement and the activities on each of the legs of that movement can require different configuration.

CALIDUS ePOD can treat each of these differently through use of a job group associated to the jobs, which controls the functionality that the driver must or should use to execute that particular leg of the order.

Specifically, loading and unloading of product at a depot can be treated as a special case, where perhaps these jobs might not explicitly be undertaken by the driver themselves.

CALIDUS ePOD can handle loading jobs at depots, unloading jobs at depots and the automatic return of items collected or not delivered back at the depot, even when those jobs are not planned into the load (ad hoc collections). The system can also control loading through a separate warehouse site, and ensure the transport leg does not start until the loading is complete.

The system can also help set up some of this functionality for you automatically.

The system has many several different ways of handling loading and unloading tasks:

• Single site
• Linked sites

Single Site

Basic functionality

External systems create these loading an unloading jobs, for example a transport management system.

Normal collection and delivery jobs are created normally.

Loading and Unloading jobs at a depot are created with a Loading or Unloading flag, depending on whether they are loading tasks at a depot or unloading tasks at a depot. This is then used to drive some special behaviour within the system.

For example, the mobile device displays these jobs as "Loading" instead of "Collection" and "Unloading" instead of delivery, for clarity.

Unloading back at the depot is controlled by the device.

Whenever items are collected from collection jobs, if there isn't a linked delivery job for that collection, an unloading job for that job will be created, linked (consolidated) with any known unloading jobs at the next depot. This will include the items collected.

Whenever any items are not delivered, the undelivered items are added to the next generic (empty) unloading job at the next depot.

The device will then control unloading of all undelivered or collected items at the next depot unloading job.

Advanced

EPOD can automatically create an unloading job from a provided loading job. So if it starts with loading at depot MYDEPOT at 0900, and no unloading job is present, an empty generic "Return to Depot" job will be created at the end of the job list, hidden from the driver, until it is needed.

Linked Sites

A site can be identified as a warehouse rather than as a transport depot.

For example:

• WARR - Warrington transport depot
• WARR-W - Warrington Warehouse

Typically, you (or your transport system) would create a load for delivery in the transport depot (e.g. "LOAD1") for all the collections and deliveries, with an unloading (return to depot) jobs.

You would then create another load in the warehouse site (e.g. "WLOAD1") just for the loading of the items for delivery. See Loading Options below for the different mechanisms and the functionality they support.

You can then link the warehouse load to the transport load. Through configuration, the system can block the transport load from being started by the transport drivers until the loading load is completed.

Regardless, the transport load will still support all of the above "single site" functionality, controlling unloading of collected or undelivered items.

Loading Options

You can create the loading Jobs as a single job, with all products to load. This is then an easy way to bulk load all products for the deliveries on the transport load. This method does not control the sequence the jobs need to be loaded. This method also does not update the delivery jobs in the transport depot if there is a discrepancy at loading.

You can create loading jobs as one per delivery job, and then link them all together i.e. consolidate them so that they look like a single job to the loaders. This then would allow the loaders to load all the items together, and would update the delivery jobs in the transport depot if there is a discrepancy at loading. This method will not consolidate all product quantities together if the same product was being loaded for multiple deliveries. This method also does not control the sequence the jobs need to be loaded.

You can create loading jobs as one per delivery job and not link them together. Instead, you can sequence them in the order in which they are to be loaded. This method controls the sequence the jobs need to be loaded. This method also updates the delivery jobs in the transport depot if there is a discrepancy at loading.