Shipping Capacity Limits empowers you to automatically control, monitor, and cap the volume allocated to your specific carriers and services. In fast-paced warehouse operations, managing carrier limits manually can lead to bottlenecks, missed collections, or breached carrier contracts.
By setting up Capacity Limits, you can:
Enforce carrier caps: Prevent overloading a carrier by automatically pausing allocations when their maximum daily limit is reached.
Track volume targets: Monitor your minimum daily volume to ensure you are meeting contractual obligations.
Automate failovers: Integrate shipping capacity limits directly into your shipment rules to automatically cascade excess volume to backup carriers and services without any manual intervention.
Before you begin creating shipping capacity limits, it is helpful to understand the three core concepts that drive this feature:
1. Dispatch cycle
A dispatch cycle is the active operational window for picking and packing for a single day's dispatch. During this time, any volume allocated to be dispatched that day counts toward the carrier volume limits you have set. A cycle opens automatically immediately after the previous day's cut-off and closes when it reaches your specified cut-off time.
Example: If Monday's cut-off is 19:00 and Tuesday's cut-off is 20:00, Tuesday's dispatch cycle will officially begin at 19:01 on Monday. Everything allocated between then and 20:00 on Tuesday will count toward Tuesday's dispatch cycle.
2. Dispatch cut-off
The dispatch cut-off is the exact time when one dispatch cycle ends, and another begins. Operationally, this is usually the time a specific carrier collects from your warehouse, or when your warehouse officially stops picking and packing for the day's dispatch (e.g., 19:30).
Once this time passes, the current dispatch cycle immediately closes. Any new volume allocated after this time will automatically roll over and count toward your next active dispatch cycle.
3. Volume limits
Volume limits are the numerical thresholds you set to control carrier allocation during a single dispatch cycle. They consist of two parts:
Minimum (target): The baseline volume you aim to give to a specific carrier.
Maximum (cap): The absolute hard limit a carrier can accept. Once this maximum cap is reached, the current dispatch cycle is marked as met, and the system will stop allocating volume to this carrier for that day.