Creating an ocean lane

1. Two ways of creating an ocean lane
2. Product Temperature Exposure
3. Defining general information
4. Adding actual lane performance in LRAs
5. Defining the transport steps
6. Modifying transport steps
7. Port Operations
8. Lane bulk actions

You can create an ocean lane in two different ways:

1. Create an empty new lane

Navigate to the 'Lanes' menu, click on the button in the Lanes overview, and provide the Lane name and the temperature range in the pop-up window.

In the pop-up form wizard, you will get an option to choose the Transport modality; Please choose Ocean.

When adding this step, you have to select the ocean carrier and the duration of the transit. You also have to select the port terminals at the origin and destination.

Please note that in a lane with ocean steps, flights are not available, but you can add road steps, warehouse steps and pick-up/drop-off points. 

Once you select Ocean, As shown in the above image, you will be given options to choose container type, packaging type, and the booked temperature range for the Lane being created. 

Please note: If you select Reefer container type, you have to choose the "Temperature Range" from the drop-down in the Booked Temperature Range for the transport and storage field. 

For the Assessment of Road steps using Reefer container types, not all capabilities are relevant, particularly trailer mapping, monitoring, etc. Thus these capabilities are not included for road steps for Lanes with Reefer container transport. Instead, relevant capabilities for drayage transport are considered.

Please note it is possible to select Frozen as a booked temperature for Ocean Lanes with Reefer Container.

If you select Dry as Container Type, you will have to choose None as the "Booked Temperature Range." 

Product Temperature Exposure

In an ocean lane assessment in the temperature exposure tab, a container type is clearly indicated as shown in the visual below. 

When selecting a reefer as a container type for the ocean, the protection is excellent, see below, the calculation of product temperature exposure is based on the container type instead of the packaging type.

How to add a product in Validaide?

Defining general information

After creating Ocean Lane, you can add additional information under the Configuration tab.

Typically, information related to the parties involved in the Lane, the Product information, the Packaging information, the Booking Details, and the user roles. The possible fields are shown below, in which the bold fields or mandatory, and other fields are optional.

How to add a product in Validaide?

Adding actual lane performance in LRAs

When creating a lane, users can add actual lane performance. This enables them to document incidents on a lane during shipments. Only users at the company that owns the lane (created it) can make such changes. If a lane is being shared with a customer, e.g. manufacturer, they cannot add this information. 

The lane performance can be added at any stage of the workflow, even Reviewed. The number of shipments during the period should be indicated. Incidents are differentiated into two types of incidents:

• Temperature-Generic - filling in only one number, the total of temperature incidents.
• Non-Temperature - The user gets a list with generic categories

Under the assessment, a user sees a lane performance tab. This will be included in the pdf export. When a lane with added lane performance is being shared with a customer, under the “Assessment tab” the customer can see Lane Performance. Currently, it will not be included in the calculation of the Pharma Index.

Shipment categories in a lane performance.

Defining the transport steps

After creating the Lane and adding general information, you can add different steps either before or after the existing steps by clicking on the corresponding buttons in the Configuration tab of a Lane:

These buttons are visible above and below the current steps.

Ocean carriers can be selected as road carriers in a lane step if the company has been set up to provide road transport or under “My Locations”, Configuration>Suppliers, as road transport providers.

When configuring a road step in an ocean lane, for the question “What is the container type?” you have two options - Same as Lane and None. The default is always set to “Same as Lane”. The Genset question disappears if option NONE is selected, this affects the assessment as well. When adding the warehouse step, the standard reefer has been added, it is possible to adjust it in the offloading step, in case lane reefer is not being used in that part of the step, same for the storage step.

Also, while adding the Ocean Step form, the user can enter both Days and Hours for the Ocean Transport Duration.

When adding or editing a handling step it is possible to select a container terminal location used at the origin and destination.

When creating an ocean lane a rail step can be added/created. In the configuration screen, select option ‘Add Ocean Step’, when indicating what vessel is being used, select ‘Rail Transport’ after that you can select the rail carrier.

Modifying transport steps

The whole concept is very flexible, as you can add the steps individually and create various combinations with them.

You can remove or edit each step by clicking on the icons next to the step:

Note that it is possible to indicate the Transport Duration in Days and Hours while modifying the Ocean step.

Port Operations

The port operations steps at the origin and destination come automatically with the ocean transport step. First, you need to select the Port Operator company, and then their Container Terminal location.
 

See video:

How to create your own view of a supplier location?

Ambient Temperature Exposure.

Lane bulk actions

Users can complete bulk actions to refresh capabilities and restart the workflow in lanes.

• Not more than 20 lanes can be refreshed (because of performance).
• Restarting the workflow can be done by the responsible of a lane or the administrator and refreshing of a lane can be done only by the responsible at the company that created the lane.
• When selecting lanes to refresh, the user will get a notification on how many lanes the system will update.
• The user can work on other things while the system is updating the lanes. The user will not get a message that it has been done. It can be seen when refreshing the lane overview page.

An additional bulk action has been added when sharing LRAs. In order to share LRAs in bulk the following criteria have to be met:

• If the customer is active on Validaide (a tenant).
• The LRAs have to have a customer assigned.
• The lanes can be shared in bulk only with the same customer at once.

When the LRAs are being shared the user with whom the lanes are being shared with, gets an email notification. If a lane is being shared it cannot be reshared. This feature currently is available only for freight forwarders.

Note: Users can download a Lane as a PDF or JSON file.