Rating Scenarios and Implementation Suggestions

Following are some rating scenarios with suggestions on how to implement them.

Assign Service Provider to a Shipment when no Valid Rates are Present

Scenario

An order is left unscheduled after the bulk plan because a valid service provider could not be found. This could be due to a lack of coverage, capacity, or rates (rate offering, rate record, or rate service). If a valid service provider is identified to immediately take the load, the planner needs a way to quickly create a shipment and assign it to this carrier for execution.

Incorrect Solution

A historical solution might be to create a generic country-to-country rate for this service provider with an artificially high cost to allow the planner to manually build and assign the shipment to this service provider. While this is a viable option, it creates unnecessary rate overhead. Further, the presence of many of these rates across all service providers can cause performance problems when OTM queries valid rates for each solution.

Suggested Solution

From the order, the planner should choose the action "Manual", accessed via Operational Planning > Create Buy Shipment > Manual. This action ignores the standard shipment planning logic and allows the planner to specify Mode, Service Provider, and either Rate Offering or Cost (among other variables). Using this action allows the planner to quickly build and execute a shipment for visibility without the immediate overhead of setting up rate offerings, rate records, or rate service records. Once the shipment is executed, the planner can properly configure rate records as needed to support the scenario.

Create Customer Pickup Shipments for Visibility

Scenario

As a shipper, I typically manage service providers throughout the transportation cycle; however, I sometimes need to coordinate Customer Pickup shipments where I do not want to manage the transportation for these shipments. Customer Pickup shipments are shipments out of my facility where my customer manages the transportation, from service provider assignment to execution and payment. I would like to have visibility to these shipments within OTM without having to set up the associated Rate Offerings, Rate Records and Rate Service records.

Incorrect Solution

As with the first scenario above, one solution might be to create generic country-to-country rates for each service provider. The desired service provider could be entered as a constraint against the order and assigned via bulk plan. This is cumbersome and adds marginal value given the scenario at hand.

Suggested Solution

Create a generic "CPU" service provider without corresponding rate configurations and select this service provider using the order action "Manual", accessed via Operational Planning > Create Buy Shipment > Manual. Enter a low cost and execute the shipment. A list of all customer pickup shipments can be queried by running a search against service provider "CPU". If more visibility is needed about the service provider details, the shipment's service provider information can be overwritten through direct SQL statements via an agent action.

Bypassing Rate Constraints during Settlement Rating

Scenario

A common scenario for Match and Pay settlement is to create a Shipment-As-Work (SAW) from the carrier invoice. The SAW shipment can then be rated in order to determine the expected cost of the shipment prior to matching it to the actual invoice. If rates have constraints (i.e. Min Weight Constraint) defined on them for planning purposes, SAW shipments may fail to rate if they violate these constraints. During settlement, it is necessary to calculate the cost of the shipment regardless of whether the shipment violates rate constraints.

Solution

There are a couple of options to solving this issue.

1. Specify the rate offering on the shipment in addition to the service provider. When a rate offering is specified on a shipment, all rate offering rules are bypassed. It may be difficult to determine the correct rate_offering_gid unless a good naming convention is used.
2. Configure a parameter set which contains overrides for "FIND RATE OFFERING RULE SET" and "FIND RATE RECORD RULE SET". This assumes that settlement is being performed in a separate domain.

Constraints can be removed from these rule sets, thus preventing a shipment from failing to rate.