Creating a road lane

1. Two ways of creating a road lane
2. Defining the General Information
3. Defining the transport steps
4. Road transport
5. Pick-up/Drop-off Phase in a Road Step
6. Lane bulk actions

You can create a road lane in two different ways:

1. Create an empty new lane

Navigate to the menu, 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.

2. 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: 

NOTE: You can only copy the lane that you own, and you can copy it even if it is shared. Once the lane is copied, it will be in "No Workflow" status.

Defining the General Information

After creating the Lane, you can add a variety of additional information in the Configuration screen, for example, related to the parties involved in the Lane, the Product information, the Packaging information, the 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?

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:

Road transport

A road step can be added practically anywhere in the lane. When adding this step, you must define the road transport company and the transit duration.

In addition, you can indicate additional details for the Lane Assessment, such as:

• Location: When a Company Location uses multiple trucking providers, the Location can be selected as a road transport provider. First, select your own Company, and then select the specific Location (which must be configured to provide Road Transport)
• Booked temperature range: you can select it to be the same as the rest of the lane, or you can set a different temperature range (none, FRO, COL, ERT, CRT)
• Expected temperature: if the truck is not temperature-controlled, which is used to determine the ambient temperature of a shipment during road transport.
• Security threat level: in the geographical area of the road transport, which can be set to Low, Medium, and High. This is a user-defined indicator for the relative safety of the geographical area of road transport. This information is used in combination with the Supplier's security capabilities to determine the Security Assessment. 
• Country security risk: The risk of origin and destination country is compared, and the system chooses the worst case. If one of the countries does not have a risk scoring it takes the available one, if none has a risk scoring it is shown as insufficient and is not considered when calculating the total risk score.

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 , Configuration>Suppliers, as road transport providers.

More on Road steps

Pick-up/Drop-off Phase in a Road Step

In the previous release, we introduced the ability to define separate pick-up and drop-off phases within a lane Road step. With this release, you also have the option to select a single phase that covers both actions, offering more flexibility during configuration.

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.