Regions

This page is accessed via:

• Shipment Management > Power Data > Geography > Regions
• Master Data > Power Data > General > Regions

A region is a user-defined geographic area. You can use regions for any of the following: itineraries, rate offerings, rate records, deconsolidation pools, dispatch- level tendering, and rate inquiry.

A region may be any size that has meaning for your business. For example, you can create a region called Mid-Atlantic and include all the Mid-Atlantic states, and then create an itinerary to carry goods from the Mid-Atlantic region to Chicago.

Regions can be used to define dispatch office location territories for a service provider. By creating a region, Oracle Transportation Management can tender directly to the dispatch location for the service provider that covers the shipment source location within its region.

When you define a region, you can assign geographic information. For example, you can create a region called Benelux, consisting of Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

Regions and lanes need to be "formulated" or "loaded" in order for them to be used. Loaded means the region and lane data, which is in a user-friendly format, is copied into other tables (that you never see), in a format that Oracle Transportation Management can use in planning and other places, not the user interface. Normally, this is transparent. Lanes and regions are automatically formulated when you enter them via the interface or XML integration. After a region has been added, the Loaded field will either display Yes or No, or if there was an error, Error. The field cannot be modified in the user interface.

Lanes are always formulated, no matter how they are loaded (i.e. even via SQL or CSV). Their formulation should never cause any errors.

Note: Regions are not formulated when loaded via SQL or CSV, which is very common. If you load regions in this way, you should ALWAYS set the loaded flag=N in the data for each record. Then run the "Formulate Regions" process from the Process Manager. For regions that formulate okay, that flag is set to Y. For regions with a formulation error, you can run that search for loaded with a status of error from the finder.

Note: A common cause of errors is if the region detail record looks like this:
geo_hierarchy=COUNTRY
province_code=AL
country_code3_ID=null

i.e. values do not match the geo_hierarchy. Do this in the user interface, and you get an error and the region is not even added, let alone formulated. This cannot be prevented when regions are loaded via CSV.

Adding a New Region

1. Enter a Region ID.
2. The Loaded field cannot be modified. After the region is added, it will be populated.
3. Select a Domain Name.
4. Enter a Region Name.
5. Enter a Representative Location if using cooperative routing or network routing.
   
   When using cooperative routing, this associates a region with a location to be used with region-distance calculations, for example. This field is not required for general functionality but regions without representative locations are ignored by cooperative routing aggregation.
   
   When using network routing, the representative location should be entered for regions that are used as the source or destination of a network leg, and is used as a stand-in for the region when determining the rated cost of going through the network leg. See "Use of Representative Location" in Bulk Plan Network Routing and "Representative Locations" in Modelling Routing Networks.

Region Details

The Region Details section is read-only. If you wish to add detail information to this record, click New Region Detail.

• Click Finished to save the entire region record.