Global Addresses & Cross-Dock Hubs

A Global Address is a location that belongs to your organisation rather than to any one customer. Marking one as Cross-Dock turns it into a hub: a place a shipment can be handed from one vehicle to another partway through its journey.

Overview

Your customers' locations live in their own Address Books, each tied to the customer that collects from or delivers to it. Some places are not like that. A depot you own, a partner's cross-dock, a transfer yard you use for whichever customer's freight happens to be moving through it: these belong to your operation as a whole.

Those are Global Addresses. They work like saved locations, but they are yours, and they are available on any work regardless of which customer it is for. Marking one as Cross-Dock goes a step further and makes it a hub, which is what lets you carry a shipment in stages through it. See the Legs article for how staged journeys work.

Key highlights

• Yours, not a customer's — A Global Address is available across your whole operation rather than to one Shipper.

• Always placed on the map — Orbit will not save a Global Address it cannot locate.

• Cross-Dock makes it a hub — Only an address marked Cross-Dock can be used to break a journey.

• Operators only — Your customers, carriers and drivers never see this list.

• A hub in use is protected — An address that active legs still route through cannot be deleted.

Where you manage them

Global Addresses are managed in Orbit MissionControl's settings, under Global Addresses. The list can be searched, and filtered to show only the addresses marked Cross-Dock.

Creating one happens in two steps. You enter the company name and address first, and Orbit places it on the map. Everything else, including opening hours, loading points and the exact map position, is set afterwards on the address's own page.

How they differ from a customer's saved locations

Each Shipper keeps its own Address Book of the places it collects from and delivers to, described in the Managing Locations & Contacts article. Those locations belong to that customer, and appear when you are working on that customer's transports.

A Global Address is not in anyone's Address Book. Its reach is the difference that matters: a saved location is offered on one customer's work, while a Global Address is available whoever the work is for. A cross-dock you run does not belong to the customer whose pallets happen to be passing through it this week.

In practice they hold much the same detail. A Global Address carries its company name and full address, sits on the map, and can have loading points for individual docks, exactly as a saved location can.

Making an address a cross-dock hub

There is no Cross-Dock checkbox.

An address becomes a hub through its opening hours. Add an opening-hours window to the address and set that window's action to Crossdock, and the address is a hub from then on. It gains a Cross-Dock badge in the list, and appears under the Cross-Dock Only filter.

This is only possible on a Global Address. A customer's saved location cannot be marked Cross-Dock, and neither can an individual loading point within either kind of address. Cross-docking is something a place does for your whole operation, so it is only offered where that is true.

What a hub gives you

A hub is what the Splitter offers you when you break a journey. Hubs appear as pins on its map and as the entries under Split at Hub, and only addresses marked Cross-Dock appear there. Using them is covered in the Using the Splitter article.

A hub also gives you two worklists. In the Legs list you can filter legs by where they end, to see what is due in to a hub, and by where they start, to see what is due out of it. Cargo waiting at a transfer point costs time, so the legs leaving a hub are usually the ones to plan first. The Legs article covers that list.

A Global Address that is not marked Cross-Dock is not somehow incomplete. It remains a perfectly good address for your operation, and can be chosen as the destination when you send failed cargo back, which does not require a hub. Marking it Cross-Dock is what you do when you want to route journeys through it.

Deleting a Global Address

An address that active legs still route through cannot be deleted. Orbit refuses and tells you that active legs still route through this address, naming one of them, so you can complete, cancel or re-plan that work first.

An address you no longer use deletes cleanly, even if it was used heavily in the past. Legs that have been delivered or cancelled keep their own record of the address as it was on the day, so removing it from your list changes nothing about that history.

A leg that failed still blocks deletion. A failed leg can be retried, and a retry would need the address again, so Orbit keeps it until that work is genuinely finished one way or the other.

Example

A logistics company in Lisbon regularly moves freight north through a partner's cross-dock in Berlin. An administrator adds the Berlin site once under Global Addresses, and Orbit places it on the map. She then opens the address, adds an opening-hours window with the action set to Crossdock, and the site picks up its Cross-Dock badge. From then on, whenever an operator splits a shipment in the Splitter, Berlin is there as a pin on the map and an entry in the hub menu, whichever customer the freight belongs to. Months later a colleague tries to tidy the address away and cannot: a shipment is still routed through it that week, and Orbit names the leg that is holding it. Once that shipment is delivered, the address can be removed.

Frequently asked questions