Automatic Dispatch

When do you need this

When you have flows that are very predictable with few decision parameters.

Automatic dispatch allows you to dispatch visitors to a yard location automatically based on simple business rules.

Main idea

• A set of business rules will determine whether a visitor can be dispatched automatically

• Each business rule works for a set of yard locations (defined by yard tags) and a set of visitors (defined by visitor conditions)

• A visitor will be dispatched when one or more visitors match the conditions and the set of yard locations has an available spot

• The dispatch order is:

  • First according to the order of the business rules (e.g. first visitors that match the first rule, then the visitors that match the second rule, … and so on)

  • When multiple visitors match the conditions of a business rule, they are dispatched according to the order defined in the rule (fifo, lifo, …)

• Whenever a visitor is being dispatched, all rules are re-evaluated, starting from the first one.

• All rules are evaluated every 1 minute or faster in case of special events:

  • a visitor is added to the queue

  • a visitor in the queue is update

  • a yard location is released

Won’t do

• Automatic dispatch based on slot booking

  • This is more complex than it may seem at first sight. It requires to take into account a grace period before and after the booking. It also needs to take into account a connection between yard locations and warehouse workers (since slots are booked per warehouse worker capacity, without any reference to the actual yard locations).

• Automatic dispatch for pick-up and drop-off

• Dynamic changes of yard location attributes with API

More information

Status changes

When a visitor is dispatched by autodispatch within 20 seconds after they were added to the queue, the status change to “waiting dispatch” will be omitted. A visitor will immediately receive the check-in status.

This allows for differentiation on communication to visitors that are sent to the waiting parking versus visitors that can be dispatched immediately.

Differentiate your communication flows

When automatic dispatch is enabled visitors registering on the SSK will receive 2 type of confirmation screens. The specific content can be differentiated per profile and per configured SSK.

When automatically dispatched	When not automatically dispatched

Combine manual and automatic dispatching

It is possible to combine manual and automatic dispatching in the same dashboard.

The Dispatch Dashboard can have a visual delay of max 10 seconds, so you should be careful in the following situations:

• Dispatch a visitor to a yard location that is meanwhile occupied. You will receive an error.

• Dispatch a visitor that was already dispatched by the automatic dispatch engine. This will result in a redispatch action, you will receive no error.

First dispatch to onsite waiting spot, then to a dock

Some customers prefer to stage drivers at a waiting area near the dock to minimize downtime between loading operations. For instance, a lemonade manufacturer with bulk loading stations may require continuous operation. In this scenario, while a truck is being filled, the next truck should already be in position and ready to go.

To meet this requirement, you can create a duplicate of the filling station location within the system. This setup ensures that the autodispatch feature will always assign a truck as soon as one of the two locations becomes available. However, note that this approach has a limitation: the dispatch dashboard will not indicate which truck is currently being filled.

How to configure

You can configure automatic dispatch under Configuration > Dispatch Dashboard > Edit dispatch dashboard > Automatic dispatch configuration tab.