Shipping Instructions Help

Your Personal Picklists

These are lists of information that you use in your business and cover the following key functions:

• Parties that ship or receive shipments, made up of Parties and Locations
  Tip: You should enter all of you known Locations first, then update the Parties.
• Railroads and Junctions that will handle your shipments
• Products that you ship
• Other specialized lists such as Grian Codes and Ports of Discharge

These functions are available from the Utilities menu at the top of the page.

Type of Information Required for your shipment

Shipping Instuction patterns are composed of "blocks" of information. You can choose the blocks that are required for your shipment so that you don't have to see information blocks that are not required.

Select the blocks required in Utilities/Pattern Manager tool. If you are not sure of the block required you can review the Block Information help page.

You must also give your pattern a name that will be used to retrieve it. We recommend using something like your customer's name, or the product name, or the route name. For example: "Joe's Warehouse", "Flower Shipments", or "Chicago UP traffic".

Press the Save button to create your new pattern.

Tip: You can quickly create similar patterns by changing the blocks, changing the Pattern Name, then press the Save As button.

Variable Information

You have not created a pattern which can be used to create Shipping Instructions for a specific shipment. To do this go to Pattern List at the top of the page, which will display a list of all your patterns. Select the pattern you need to use for this shipment.

Shipments often have the same "normal" information for each shipment. This information can be added to the pattern so that you do not need to retype it each time. For example, the weight is always 50,000 pounds, so enter this once in the pattern and you'll never have to enter it for each shipment.

Once you have entered all the "normal" information, press the Save Pattern button and your variable information will be saved.

Note: some information cannot be saved in a pattern because it should be different, or reviewed, for each shipment. For example the equipment number.