The first thing you should do when starting up your account is adding your locations, facilities and sections. The number of locations, facilities and sections is not limited, you can add as many as you want.
Terminology
What do we actually mean with these terms?
Location: A location is a yard that consists of one or more facilities.
Facility: A facility can be a warehouse, oil loading station, silo, trailer drop-off,...
Section: A loading point or dock is called a section.
How to set up your locations, facilities and sections?
1. Create a location
General info: Define the name and address of your location
Facilities: Add the facilities for this location
Users: Add users who can only see this location
2. Create a facility
2.1 General info
Name your facility and define the material types that can be (un)loaded.
2.2 Timings
You can define your slot settings:
Arrival milestone: The moment that the driver arrives at the location. This milestone can have an estimated and actual time.
Note: this is not the actual start of the slot. This milestone indicates the time the driver has to be there in advance so you have a buffer and so you can eliminate the delays.Check-in milestone: Driver is registered at the gate.
Note: this is the actual start of the slot.Start activity milestone: Operators start (un)loading the truck.
End activity milestone: (Un)loading is finished.
Departure milestone: Driver leaves the location.
Arrival margin: The time that the driver needs to be at the location before his slot starts.
Slot duration: Time between check-in and departure milestone.
Handling time: Time deeded to go to or return from the section.
And define the booking range; the period wherein a slot can be booked:
Bookable from: Start of the booking period, expressed in the number of days before the start of the slot.
Bookable until: End of the booking period, expressed in the number of days before the start of the slot.
Note: the number for Bookable from needs to be bigger than Bookable until.
2.3 Sections
Add your sections one by one. You can configure all the settings from above for each section separately.
Note: If you edit the settings of a section, it will have custom settings (you will see a label in the section table). This means that changes made to the settings of the facility, will not be applied to the settings of this section.
Link the settings of the section back to the settings of the facility? Open the section and click on "Reset to default" in the top bar.
2.4 Reason codes
Select all the actions where you want the user to fill in a reason code. If you haven't added any reason code in your reason code settings, you should do that first.
2.5 Users
Add users who can only see this facility.
2.6 Advanced slot calculation settings
You can define slot duration for your facility by creating and applying templates. By adding advanced slot calculation settings, you can have more flexibility to invoke automatic slot calculation based on material characteristics of incoming transport that needs to be (un)loaded. For example, you can configure the system to show 20 minutes slots, if the incoming truck is carrying pallets of quantity 10. More information on this has been explained in the article here - Configure advanced slot calculation settings
3. Repeat this for all the locations and facilities you want to add.
Well done, your setup is ready!
Next up: create and apply a template.
