Dwell Time

Dwell Time is the duration spent by an order or a ship unit at a cross dock. OTM calculates the handling cost for an outbound shipment at a cross dock using dwell time. The outbound shipment can have goods from different inbound shipments and different services are applied to various parts of the goods.

The handling costs for an outbound shipment can vary by:

• Order release source region
• Order release destination region
• Time spent at the cross dock
• Volume of the goods being handled

OTM uses the secondary charge shipment to represent the handling costs. This shipment is created based on a master freight shipment which contains additional charges and information that is paid to a different service provider other than the freight shipment. For this reason, it is modeled as a separate shipment.

In order to calculate the dwell time of each order release at a cross dock, you have to generate the secondary charge on the outbound shipment. When the outbound shipment departs from the cross dock, the durations for each ship unit and order releases are fixed.

Dwell time is calculated based on the difference between the departure time of the ship unit on the outbound shipment and the arrival time of the corresponding ship unit on the inbound shipment. The departure and arrival time are taken from the shipment stop, where a ship unit is picked up and dropped off respectively.

The Calculate Ship Unit Duration check box is on the secondary charge rule to enable or disable the calculation of dwell time while building a secondary charge.

The glog.business.secondarycharge.shipUnitDwellTimeCalc.truncateDates property calculates dwell time for secondary charge shipments.

Dwell Time Metric

A metric called DWELL TIME is added for allocating costs to orders by the dwell time they spent in a cross dock.

DWELL TIME metric is added only for the basis of ORDER and the check box 'Use Shipment Ship Unit for Order' in the allocation method definition does not apply to this metric since OTM gets the dwell time for the ship unit itself.

When a secondary charge shipment is rated using a marginal rating setup for the dwell time, the allocation of the cost depends on the cost references assigned to the generated costs. Since OTM is using marginal rating to generate the cost, the dwell time that OTM gets while allocating will not be reflective of the amount of the dwell time used while rating. Hence the allocation will be wrong if rate the shipment in a traditional manner where OTM adds up the cost of each stop ship unit on which the cost occurs.

For example, let us say you have three orders: OR1, OR2, OR3. A shipment with three shipment ship units is built with the below relation and the dwell time is calculated as follows: SSU1 - OR1- 1: SSU2 - OR2 - 2: SSU3 - OR3 - 3. Let us say the Marginal rate setup is such that the first day is free, second day is charged $1/day and the third day is charged $2/day. When OTM rates the shipment, there will be one cost that will be generated with $4. If trying to allocate this cost to the order releases using the dwell time metric, the cost for each of the order releases will be: OR1 - $0.66 OR2 - $1.34 OR3 - $2.00. Though the first order release didn't contribute anything to the cost, it is allocated some cost which is wrong. So in order to resolve this, the rate cost setup in the rate record has been changed to collect all costs separately. For this, use the Charge Multiplier option on the rate cost and select the option 'Collect all costs separately'.

When using this option, the order release references have been corrected to point to the correct order release lines and hence the cost will be allocated properly to each of the order release. The costs that will be generated when using this multiplier option are: SSU1 - $0; SSU2 - $0, $1; SSU3 - $0, $1, $2. The cost reference for each of these six costs generated will be the order release line for which the shipment ship unit is related. Now when the costs are allocated by dwell time: OR1 - $0; OR2 - $0, $1;OR3 - $0, $1, $2. In order to get the order releases correctly, OTM uses the following logic to get the order release lines:

• When charged by Shipment Ship Unit line - the order release line corresponding to the shipment line is fetched.
• When charged by Shipment Ship Unit - the order release lines corresponding to the shipment ship line of this shipment ship unit are fetched.
• When charged by Stop Ship unit - the order release lines corresponding to the shipment ship unit of this is fetched.
• When charged by Shipment stop - the order release lines corresponding to the stop ship units for this stop are fetched.
• When charged by equipment - the order release lines corresponding to the shipment ship units of this equipment are fetched.
• When charged by order - the order release lines corresponding to the order are fetched.
• When charged by order release stop - the order release lines corresponding to the shipment stop for this or stop are fetched.
• When charged by order release refnum - the order release lines corresponding to the order are fetched.
• When charged by shipment refnum - All of the refnums (hence null).
• When charged by order base refnum - the order release lines corresponding to the order of this order base are fetched.
• When charged by Special service - the order release lines of the object which is the cause of the origin of this special service is used.
• When charged by ERU - is not yet implemented.