Order Book

Order Book is an application designed to streamline the management of your Orders. This is made easier by providing Locations, TransportRequests, Companies and Conditionals. All these entities can be managed through our APIs, enabling allow you to constantly enrich Orders and capture domain knowledge that is not available in the source systems.

Philosophy

Keep the input simple

All of our customers have a source of work, this is translated into orders on our side. We provide software to make a great planning with these orders. Of course the planning needs some information that can always be found, the basics are when and where. We typically try to offer API's that do not require in depth information about the settings that control and steer the planning. This keeps the complexity on the input side lower and allows for a faster integration as it is very likely that not all planning related options can be found in your source system as it is probably not a planning system.

Keep the source of truth clear

Since these orders come in from another source, this source being the leading system we don't offer to directly change or update on the order level in orderbook. This is to avoid confusion where data was changed. Of course, some data needs to be modified structurally for the planning. For this we offer the concept of a conditional this will be applied to any order that matches its conditions and will have a fixed effect on them. We try to make this as visible as possible and use the concept to capture what is hard to capture in the source system but has a clear impact on the quality of the planning. For more information look at the concept of the conditional within the orderbook domain.

How to organise orders for use in the planning

The deprecated category feature

Originally we started by having categories within the API but quickly found them to be unsuited for all usecases as you can have only one per order. This feature has been deprecated in favor of Labels.

Labels

An order can have many of these and on its own only serves an informational purpose. But there are other tools within our platform that hook into the presence of labels to apply rules on such as order vehicle constraints that allow you to apply a penalty or incentive if a certain label on an order can be matched with a certain label on a vehicle.

Another use of the label feature is to select which orders belong together in a planning. Currently the filter works by matching any label it can find on your order to select it in the planning. So if you need more specific control, add concatenated version of the label to your order. Example: depot-antwerp and frozen if both would be in a filter than any frozen good would be in there. A concatenated version of that label would look like frozen-depot-antwerp and then it becomes specific to only select the frozen goods from that depot into the planning.

Plangroup

Orders can have one plangroup, this is a feature to make a harder separation between sets of orders when they are for example separate business units. In the filter you can select one plangroup, and within that plangroup you can still use labels to subselect the orders.