What is auto-consolidation?
Auto-consolidation is a feature of Machship that is enabled on a per carrier basis, where we combine newly created consignments into existing consignments at the point they are created, rather than making a new consignment.
The primary reason for doing this is to save on freight costs, but there are also integration simplification advantages where your ERP or WMS can simply create consignments and not have to manage them being combined as MachShip can manage that.
Auto-consolidation workflow
The workflow for auto-consolidation is as follows:
- An unmanifested consignment is created with a consignment id and barcodes generated, and labels likely printed - we will call this our "original consignment"
- Later on, a second consignment is created going to the same customer, with the same carrier and service selected
- Prior to allocating a consignment ID and barcode to this new consignment, we first check to see if there is an existing consignment with the same FROM and TO details, and the same carrier and service, that is in an unmanifested status.
- If a match is found, we add the line items from this newly created consignment to the matched consignment, and trigger the printing of the additional labels instead of making a new consignment - in this case it would mean these new line items are added to the original consignment from step one.
- If no match is found, we continue to delegate the consignment id and barcodes for a new consignment.
Requirements
For auto-consolidation to occur, the following criteria are required:
- Created under the same company id
- "companyId": "1111",
- All FROM AND TO details match
- toName
- toAddressLine1
- toAddressLine2
- toLocation - suburb, postcode
- Carrier, Service and account match
- carrierId
- carrierServiceId
- carrierAccountId
- Existing consignment is unmanifested
Common Questions & Issues
Can auto-consolidation work with least cost routing?
No, auto-consolidation cannot work with least cost routing - you must pre-allocate the carrier, service and account when you create the consignment for auto-consolidation to work.
If you're wanting to use least cost routing, you will need to implement one of the following solutions:
- After creating a consignment, store the consignment id - then prior to creating a consignment check if you have other open shipments/orders (not manifested) to the same customer that have a consignment id set - if you do, get that id and call "get consignment" and retrieve the carrier id, service and account id from that consignment as well as validating it is unmanifested. Append them to your create request.
- Similar to the above, but instead store the carrier id, service and account - prior to creating a consignment check if you have other open shipments/orders (not manifested) to the same customer that have these values set - if so, get the carrier id, service and account and preset that on your create consignment call.
What happens to the reference fields during consolidation?
References are concatenated together with a comma - so new references are appended to the first consignments values.
Is there a way to enable auto-consolidation for some consignments, but not for others?
The way to do this would be to look at the required fields and ensure they do not match in these instances.
You could add a unique ID to the contact name for example.
How does this effect the labels that are printed?
If you printed 3 initially, they would be 1 of 3 through to 3 of 3. Then, if you added two more, those labels would say 4 of 5 and 5 of 5.