Automation rules — one of the highlighting and powerful features of Carriyo are what enables users to automate the process of carrier assignment to shipments. Automation rules can be set up for both forward and reverse shipments in their respective subsections namely Forward Automations and Reverse Automations under Automation.
Forward Automations are rules applied to shipments from merchant to customer (forward shipments) and Reverse Automations consist of rules that are applied to shipments from customer to merchant (reverse shipments).
Automation rules that have similar properties — merchants and pickup countries — are created to be contained within the same ruleset. Inside a ruleset, priority levels dictate how rules operate i.e., the rule with the lowest priority is checked first. Even in the absence of a ruleset, priority matters.
Automation rules can be assigned to single or multiple carriers. In case of the latter happpening, Carriyo provides two different options to distribute the shipments within the carrier accounts selected — cheapest & round robin (percentage based).
Permissions: Creation and management of automation rules and rulesets are restricted to users holding roles as Admin, Manager, or Account Manager.
As mentioned above, the categorization of rulesets is done in accordance with the pickup countries and merchants selected. In addition to this, automation rules also provide the options to set Schedule and Conditions.
- Setting up a Schedule ensures that the shipments influenced by the rule are only those that are booked within the specified timeframes on designated days.
- Conditions are established to allow users to refine the specificity of assigned shipments. A shipment will be allocated to a particular carrier based on a rule only if every condition of that rule aligns with the attributes of the shipment.
This means that when a shipment is created in association with a particular merchant and the Auto Select (AI Automation) option is enabled for carriers, it will look into the rulesets by trying to match the delivery type, payment type and other shipment attributes and basic conditions. It will skip the rule if it doesn't match and go to the next rule and so on until a matching rule is found/not found. If a rule isn't found, users will have to reassign or edit and book the shipment.
If the Auto Select (AI Automation) option is disabled and a carrier account is assigned to a shipment, the carrier will be the manually assigned one.
It is essential to note that carrier assignment is also determined by other factors. The process first checks Automation rules and shortlists all the rules for which the basic conditions match. It then goes on to check carrier conditions namely Carrier Network, Carrier Availability, Carrier Capacity, etc. It is only after going through this process that the carrier is assigned.
For an automation rule to take effect, its state must be set to 'active'. If the ruleset is inactive, it will affect the functionality of the individual rules within the ruleset. Consequently, both the ruleset and the rules require their state to be set to 'active'.
For Reverse automation rules, the roles of Pickup and Dropoff locations switch.
To learn how to create and manage automation rulesets or create automation rules, visit the dedicated articles for each.
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