Creating an air lane

1. Three ways of creating a lane
2. Defining the General Information
3. Defining the transport steps
4. Flights
5. Lane bulk actions

You can create an air lane in three different ways:

1. Create a Lane from the Flight Search (applicable for Airfreight only)

From the "Flight Search" menu, you can create a Lane for a specific Flight and create a lane with the first flight leg.

Note:

1.  When creating a Lane from Flight Search, the modality is automatically set to Air.
2.   You can only search for direct flights.

Selecting multiple flight codes.

2. Create an empty new lane in the lane menu

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

When creating the Lane the user first sets the modality to Air, Ocean, or Road.

Note: If the modality chosen is Air, it is impossible to add an Ocean step to a lane. Similarly, if the modality chosen is Ocean, it is not possible to add a flight step. If the modality chosen is Road, it is not possible to add Flight or Ocean Steps to a Lane. 

3. Copy an existing Lane

You can easily create a new Lane by copying an existing Lane. Click on the lane you would like to copy to open it and then copy it by clicking on the Copy Lane button in a Lane screen: 

Defining the General Information

After creating the Lane, you can add a variety of additional information on the Configuration page, for example, related to the parties involved in the lane, the product information, packaging information, booking details, and the user roles. 

Note: Whenever viability does not apply to the chosen packaging type, please fill in 0 as packaging viability to exclude it from the lane risk assessment. 

How to add a product in Validaide?

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 lower in the Configuration screen of a Lane:

These buttons are visible above and below the existing steps.

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

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

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.

Flights

A flight can be added before and after another flight, a road step, or a warehouse step.

When adding a Flight, a Ground Handling step will automatically be added at the Origin and Destination Airport.

Please note that the flight search only looks for direct flights. You have to be aware of the connections before building the lane.

Selecting multiple flight codes.

Connecting Flights:

It is possible to add a connecting flight before or after an existing flight. It is possible to add connecting flights with different airlines if both airlines have the same GHA at the connecting location.

Transfer Types

Connecting Lanes to SOPs of different users

Lane bulk actions

Users can complete bulk actions to request lane update and deactivation, approve and restart the workflow in lanes, share lanes with a customer, and refresh capabilities.

Request Lane Update and Deactivation

After clicking on the “Update” or "Deactivation" button, a popup window will appear. Fill in the information and click on “Update” or "Deactivation". This request will be sent to the lane owner. The lane owner then has two options - to approve or to reject the request.

When clicking on the lane name, the system guides the user to the lane. The group members can claim lane by lane.

When the lane gets approved, a task is created for the responsible for the lane. This applies both to the lanes of the manufacturer or forwarder user if managed from tasks.

The requester can cancel the request and close it.

When assigning directly to a responsible.

When there is no group, the update request is sent directly to the responsible. If rejected, the request goes back to the requester. If the request is accepted, the workflow is automatically restarted.

If a lane deactivation has been approved, the lane will still be visible, but it will no longer appear as ”Active”. 

It is possible to limit the possibility of sending the lane deactivation/update to a specific group of people. To do that, a group of users has to be pre-defined by an administrator user, and then the limitation of lane creation has to be set in the settings. 

Approve and Restart Workflow

• Restarting the workflow can be done by the responsible of a lane or the administrator.
• Email and password must be entered when approving or restarting workflow

Share with Customer

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

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

Refresh Capabilities

• Not more than 20 lanes can be refreshed (because of performance).
• Capabilities refreshing 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.

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