Orders, Products, and Shipments

Most routing software treats a customer as a place with a quantity attached. Optrak keeps more than that — the orders, the lines inside them, the products, the containers they pack into, and the shipments that go on the vehicle. So when two orders to the same site need different vehicles, or turn up at the depot at different times, that becomes something to plan around rather than something to work around.

Why “A Customer and a Quantity” Isn’t Enough

Most routing software treats a customer as a place with a quantity attached — usually a weight, a volume, or both, though some products allow a few more measures than that. It works perfectly well when two orders to the same site are interchangeable: ready at the same time, able to go on the same vehicle, due in the same window, and no consequences from putting them together.

When they are not interchangeable, that single quantity leaves the planner with two poor choices. Put them together as one delivery and lose whichever timing mattered most. Keep them apart as two visits and pay the fixed time at that site twice when once would have done. Either way the customer gets a worse service: a late delivery, or an unnecessary cost on every drop. Planners can work around it with rules and made-up product codes, but the software can’t see what is being worked around — so it can’t weigh up the choice, and the planner ends up rebuilding the plan afterwards.

Optrak handles this by keeping five things separate — orders, the lines on them, products, the containers they travel in, and shipments — and putting all five in front of the optimiser, rather than one quantity per customer. Two cases show what that buys.

Worked Example 1: One Order, Split Across Vehicles

A car dealership orders 1000L of bulk motor oil and 2 pallets’ worth of packaged lubricants on a single order. The delivery fleet comprises bulk multi-pot tankers, some flatbeds and 2 hybrid vehicles that use IBCs and on-board pumps. The smart shipment builder recognises the bulk/packaged combination within the order and splits it into 2 shipments, bulk and packaged.

In one scenario, both a bulk tanker and a flatbed are required already in the same area as the dealership. The optimiser decides to keep the shipments separate, incurring an extra fixed component on the delivery time but allowing the hybrid to be used elsewhere.

Scenario one: shipments kept separate. A bulk tanker and a flatbed already working the area each make a delivery — two fixed delivery times — but both hybrids stay available for other work.

In the opposite scenario, the optimiser decides to keep the shipments together and use the hybrid truck.

Scenario two: shipments combined on a hybrid. One trip, one fixed delivery time — at the cost of committing a scarce hybrid vehicle to this job.

Worked Example 2: Two Orders Sharing Roll-Cages

A convenience store places its regular order for the day — some ambient grocery lines and some frozen. A couple of hours later, before the round is built, it phones in a small top-up: a few more ambient lines and a little extra frozen. That late add-on arrives as a second order against the same store, for the same delivery day.

Ambient and frozen can’t share a roll-cage — the frozen lines need a frozen cage, the ambient lines an ambient one. Treated as two separate shipments, the two orders need four cages: the main order fills its ambient and frozen cages nicely, but the little add-on produces a second ambient cage and a second frozen cage that are barely a quarter full. And a roll-cage that’s a quarter full still takes a full cage’s footprint on the vehicle.

Kept separate: four roll-cages, two of them almost empty — four cage-footprints of vehicle floor for goods that would fit in two.

Optrak’s shipment builder spots that both orders go to the same store on the same day and aggregates their order lines by temperature: all the ambient into one ambient cage, all the frozen into one frozen cage. Two well-filled cages instead of four — half the floor space, with no change to what the store receives.

Combined: the late add-on’s lines merge into the existing cages. Two cages, two footprints — the same goods in half the vehicle floor.

Technical Detail

Orders move goods between sites — depots and customers. Sites are covered on their own page, Sites; what follows is what Optrak keeps on top of them.

Orders

An order is a request to move goods from one or more sites to one or more sites, with earliest and latest collection and delivery times. The from/to pattern can be one-to-one, one-to-many (distribution from a depot), or many-to-one (collection or consolidation). Order earliest/latest times are independent of site opening hours, which is what allows booked deliveries — a site is open from 8am, but the customer requested a 10:00-11:00 delivery slot.

Order Lines

Each order has one or more order lines. A line carries a quantity, which product it is, and the dimensions where those can’t be worked out from the product and the quantity. Lines are the level at which packing is worked out and at which part of an order can be sent on ahead.

Products

A product carries what it is, dangerous goods (ADR) codes, unit size, and the rules for loading and stacking it. What vehicles it can go on is set here too — bulk against packed, temperature requirements, whether an ADR-certified vehicle is needed — and it is checked while the round is being built, not filtered out afterwards.

Intermediate Containers

Goods travel grouped into something — a pallet, a roll-cage, a stillage, a tote — and Optrak treats that container as a thing in its own right, with its own dimensions and its own packing rules. The type is deliberately open: whatever your operation groups goods into to handle them, you describe it and the optimiser plans around it.

The room an order takes up on a vehicle is not simply its lines added together — it depends on how those lines pack into containers, and how the containers sit in the vehicle. A roll-cage half full of one product still takes a whole roll-cage’s worth of floor space.

Shipments

A shipment gathers lines from one or more orders that are going to the same place, packed into one or more containers. If a customer has two orders ready at the same time, a shipment can put the lines from both into a single roll-cage rather than two. Large orders can be split across several shipments, and an individual line can be split too. The shipment is what actually gets placed on a vehicle.

How This Compares

Other routing systems know about orders too — your customer-service team takes them, your dispatchers work with them all day. The real question is what the optimiser sees. In most routing-focused products, each customer’s orders are boiled down to a single demand figure before the optimiser runs. The optimiser solves that simpler problem, and the order detail is stitched back on afterwards. That works fine when two orders to the same site are interchangeable — but it falls apart in exactly the cases above, and the gap is widest in operations like mixed bulk/packed deliveries or multi-temperature distribution with split loads. Optrak keeps the orders whole, all the way into the optimiser.