Creating Legs Using The Shipment Splitter

The Shipment Splitter is where you decide how a shipment is carried: straight through, through a hub, or across several vehicles. You stage the whole plan, review it, and apply it in one step.

Overview

A shipment states what has to happen. The Splitter is where you work out how. In it you reshape a shipment's legs: dividing a journey at a hub, moving part of the cargo onto a second vehicle, joining stages back together, and putting each stage onto a tour.

One thing is worth knowing before you start. In the Splitter you are editing a plan, not the shipment. Nothing you do reaches the shipment until you apply it, and until then you can step back through your changes or return to where you started. See the Legs article for what a leg is and how legs make up a journey.

Key highlights

• Stage, then apply — Your changes are held until you apply them, so you can try things out freely.

• The journey stays whole — Orbit accepts only a plan in which every load still travels from the shipment's pickup through to its dropoff.

• Undo and redo — Step back through your changes, or reset to the saved plan.

• Warnings you can accept — Orbit tells you when a plan looks tight, then lets you decide.

• Work under way is protected — A leg that has started cannot be reshaped.

Opening the Splitter

You reach the Splitter from a shipment, either on its detail page or from a shipment list. On a shipment that has never been carried in stages the action reads Split Shipment into Legs; once it has, the same action reads Edit Legs. You can also open it from a single leg, either in the shipment's Legs section or on the leg's own page, where the action reads Edit Leg and opens the same window with that leg already selected.

The Splitter opens as its own window, which you can move and resize, so you can keep working elsewhere in Orbit MissionControl while it is open. Opening it again for the same shipment brings that window to the front rather than starting a second one.

The action is available only while at least one leg can still be edited, and you need permission to update shipments and to read legs.

What the Splitter shows

The map fills the window. It draws each leg of the shipment, the routes of the tours you could use, and a pin for every cross-dock hub available to you.

The shipment summary gives you the fixed facts: how many loads there are, their total weight, the delivery window, and the shipment's own pickup and dropoff. These do not change, whatever you do to the legs.

The Legs panel lists the legs in the order they are travelled, with parallel legs shown alongside each other. Each row carries the leg's status and the tour assigned to it, if any. Right-clicking a leg opens the menu of things you can do to it.

The Tour Candidates panel shows the tours that could carry the leg you have selected. It follows your selection, so until you click a leg it simply invites you to pick one.

A bar along the bottom carries undo and redo, Reset, a count of the tours your changes would affect, and Apply. Nothing you do reaches the shipment until you apply.

Reshaping the journey

Everything you can do to a leg is in one place. Right-click a leg, either its row in the Legs panel or its line on the map, and the menu lists the actions available to it. The menu is honest about what is possible: an action that would not work on that leg is either absent or shown greyed with the reason, so you are never left guessing why nothing happened.

Where two legs run in parallel, the merge entry names the lane you would be merging with, so you can tell them apart.

Three of these are also gestures. You can split at a hub by dragging a leg onto the hub's pin, and put a leg on a tour, either way, by dragging it onto that tour. Everything else is done from the menu.

Merging is the reverse of splitting, and is offered when two legs genuinely belong together: one ending where the next begins and carrying the same loads, or two parallel legs running between the same two addresses.

Taking a leg off its tour, or splitting a leg that was already on one, leaves that tour without the work it was carrying. You do not have to tidy up after it. When you apply, Orbit rebuilds the tour around whatever remains on it, and cancels it outright if it is left carrying nothing at all.

Three of these deserve a closer look.

Splitting at a hub

Splitting at a hub replaces one leg with two, meeting at the hub you choose, both waiting to be routed.

The hubs on offer are your organisation's own locations that are marked as cross-dock. If none have been set up, the menu tells you there are no cross-dock addresses available, and no pins appear on the map. Setting them up is covered in the Global Addresses & Cross-Dock Hubs article.

Where you have many, the menu includes a search, and each hub is listed with the rough extra distance splitting there would add, so you can weigh a convenient hub against a costly detour.

Parallel lanes

When cargo will not fit on a single vehicle, you can move some of it onto a parallel lane: a second leg running between the same two addresses, carrying the loads you moved. Both legs then sit at the same point in the journey, and you route each one separately.

You move whole loads. At least one load must stay on the original leg, and you cannot divide a single load between two lanes, so eight pallets recorded as one load travel together. If you need them to travel separately, they need to be separate loads on the shipment.

Putting a leg on a tour

There are two ways to put a leg on a tour, and the difference is in what moves.

Route Leg onto Tour, shown as Add to Tour when you drag, keeps the leg exactly as it is. The tour takes on the leg's pickup and dropoff as two new stops, which means the tour diverts to reach them. Use this when you are happy for the tour to be reshaped around the work.

Dock onto Tour, shown as Leave Pre- and Post-Carriage Open when you drag, keeps the tour as it is instead. The tour carries only the middle section of the journey, between its own existing first and last stops, and Orbit creates up to two further legs for the pre-carriage and post-carriage: the run from the original pickup to where the tour begins, and from where the tour ends to the original dropoff. Those arrive unrouted, for you to plan separately. Use this when the tour is a fixed line-haul you do not want to divert.

Where the tour already starts and ends at the leg's own addresses, neither connector is needed and the two options produce the same result.

Dragging a leg

Splitting at a hub and putting a leg on a tour are often quicker done by hand on the map. Pick up a leg by its handle on the map, or by its row in the Legs panel, and drop it on a hub pin or on one of the tours offered for it.

Dropping on a hub splits the leg there straight away. Dropping on a tour always asks which of the two tour options you want, because both are always possible. If several targets sit under the pointer, Orbit lists them and lets you choose rather than guessing.

Choosing a tour

The Tour Candidates panel does the searching for you. Candidates are grouped by how well they fit: those that fit, those that fit with caveats such as a tight connection or a nearly full vehicle, and those that do not fit. Within each group they are ordered by how much time the detour adds, so the cheapest option to run is at the top.

One cause of caveats is worth recognising, because it is the commonest. When you are choosing a tour for a leg whose earlier leg has not been planned yet, Orbit has no settled time for when the cargo will reach the transfer point, so the connection rests on an assumption. Rather than present that as a clean fit, it ranks the tour with caveats. Planning the earlier leg first settles the question.

A tour that cannot take the load is still listed, marked Over Capacity. This is deliberate: knowing why a tour is unsuitable is more useful than not seeing it at all. Capacity here is a real load-plan check of whether the cargo fits alongside what the tour already carries, not a comparison of weights. When Orbit cannot work it out, it says so rather than guessing.

A tour you have already used elsewhere in the plan you are staging shows as Assigned in Draft, and cannot be chosen twice: a shipment puts at most one of its legs on any one tour.

The panel shows the best handful of options rather than every tour you run, so a tour you had in mind may simply have ranked below them.

When no candidates appear

An empty panel usually has a plain explanation:

• No leg is selected. Candidates are worked out for one leg at a time, so the panel waits for you to click one.

• Nothing suitable runs then. Orbit looks at tours around the leg's own dates, so a tour running a week later is not offered.

• The obvious tours are ruled out. A tour that has been cancelled or completed cannot take new work, and a tour already carrying another leg of this shipment is not offered again.

If nothing suitable exists, you do not have to wait for one. Leave the leg unrouted and plan it later, or start a new tour for it.

Staging, undo and applying

Everything you do is held in the Splitter until you apply it. Undo steps back through your changes, redo puts them back, and Reset returns you to the plan as it was saved.

When you are ready, Apply opens a review of what you are about to do. It shows the legs that will be created, the legs that will change, and each affected tour with the legs it gains and loses, along with an estimate of how many stops it will have afterwards. Any warnings appear here too. Nothing is committed until you confirm from that review, and confirming while a warning is on screen is how you accept it.

Once applied, the plan takes effect on the shipment and the Splitter closes.

Warnings you can accept

None of these stop you. They are judgements about how comfortably a plan will run, and you are better placed to make the call than Orbit is, so you can apply the split anyway.

If the check itself cannot be carried out, Orbit tells you that instead of reporting no warnings, and you can still apply.

Occasionally a plan changes between your review and your confirmation, because someone else has been working at the same time. When that happens Orbit does not quietly apply a plan you have not seen: it stops and asks you to reopen the review and look again.

What the Splitter will not do

Some things are refused outright, with no way to override them, because they are not judgement calls:

• A plan that would break a load's journey, leaving it stranded partway or with no route to its destination.

• Any change to a leg that is already under way or has finished. These legs have no drag handle and no menu, so the plan you are editing is always the part of the journey still ahead.

• A change based on a view that is no longer current. If the shipment is edited while you have it open, the Splitter tells you, and asks you to reload before applying.

• A tour that has been cancelled or completed since you chose it.

A shipment can also have at most ten legs. Once you reach that, the options that would add another are shown but unavailable.

The Splitter works on one shipment at a time. There is no way to select several shipments and route them all through the same hub in one action: each is opened, planned and applied on its own. Where you do want to work on many at once, plan the legs themselves from the Legs list, which is described in the Legs article.

Example

Meridian Foods books six pallets from Rotterdam to Praha, and no single vehicle is going the whole way. Julia opens the Splitter on the shipment and drags the leg onto the cross-dock pin at Nürnberg, which gives her two legs: Rotterdam to Nürnberg, and Nürnberg to Praha. She selects the first and adds it to a line-haul tour that already runs that lane. She then selects the second, and the candidates panel offers the tours that could carry it onward: a direct run to Praha, and regional tours that would get there by way of Plzeň or Karlovy Vary. Nothing has reached the shipment yet, so she reviews the two legs and the tour they affect, and applies (see the screenshot above showcasing exactly this situation).

Frequently asked questions