Hold processing

Sterling™ Order Management System allows a shipment or load to be held for multiple reasons.

Holds of a certain type prevent a shipment or load from being processed by transactions that are associated with that hold type. Holds of certain types can also prevent certain modifications to be applied to a shipment or load. If an enterprise wants to perform an address verification every time an address is changed or a date verification every time a delivery date is changed, the shipment or load needs to be kept from being processed until those checks are completed.

A hold can be in three different statuses:

• Created, when the hold has just been applied to a shipment or load, and has not yet been examined.
• Rejected, when the hold has been reviewed by a supervisor who decided that the shipment or load should not be processed.
• Resolved, when the hold has been reviewed by a supervisor who decided that the shipment or load should be processed.

Hold types can be applied in the following ways:

• Manually: a supervisor may feel that a shipment or load needs to be placed on hold for fraud check, and applies the hold through the Application Console. It is possible to configure a particular hold type so that only users of a specific group, or set of groups, can apply the hold to a shipment or load.
• Automatically on shipment or load creation: every time a shipment or load is created, it is placed on a specific hold type by default.
• Automatically upon resolution of another hold type: if a certain hold type is resolved, it can trigger another hold type automatically. This is specified in the hold type that is being applied on resolution of the other.
• Automatically when a specific modification type occurs: hold types can be configured to be placed automatically when a certain modification type occurs at the shipment or load level, for instance a terrorist threat hold when there is a tip-off that a load may contain bombs or drugs for a terrorist organization.

Independent of how the hold is applied, it is possible to specify a condition that determines whether or not the shipment or load should be put on hold. For example, you could want to place only shipments with a specific delivery address on hold. You can use the condition builder to do this on a hold type.

By default, all transactions are allowed to process a shipment or load that is on hold. Using the Applications Manager, you can specify which transactions are prevented from processing a shipment or load that is in a particular hold type. Transactions that can be configured to not process shipments or loads on hold are known as hold type enabled transactions, and are defined at the document type level for a given enterprise. Custom transactions that are not derived from an abstract transaction are all hold type enabled.

Two transactions need to be configured to process shipments or loads that are in a hold type, and then remove them from that hold: one for holds in created status, and another for holds in rejected status. Additionally, holds can be resolved manually, and it is possible to specify a set of user groups with the authorization to do so. That, too, is done at the document type level for a given enterprise, in the Applications Manager.