This article will explain more about the concept of unknown shipments, also called orphan shipments in Portal.
What is an unknown shipment?
Unknown shipments are also called orphan shipments in Portal. An unknown shipment is created, when a Scan App event is uploaded to Portal before the original shipment. It is labeled ScanApp orphan and belongs to the same installation as the Action Center used to create the event.
Unknown shipments will only be created if the feature is enabled in the Action Center linked to the Scan App that was used to create the event. If it is disabled, the Scan App event will not be added to Portal before the shipment is uploaded.
Example of an unknown (orphan) shipment:
When the original shipment is uploaded, the event is attached to this and the orphan shipment is deleted.
Unknown shipments are only created in your installation if you have enabled this in your Action Center. See the next section in the article to learn how to.
If you use Scan App to scan shipments that are not produced in your own DeliveryHub, the scanning events will not appear in your Portal but will be uploaded to the original shipments. If you want the events to appear in your DeliveryHub as orphan shipments, you can use a barcode suffix. Read more about this in our article Using barcode suffix in Scan App.
Enable or disable unknown shipments in Action Center
It is possible to enable or disable the creation of unknown shipments in your Action Center, but only users with an Owner profile have access to change this setting. While Admin and Regular users can create Action Centers, they cannot change the setting for unknown shipments.
Follow these steps to enable/disable the creation of unknown shipments:
- Log into Portal with your Owner profile.
- Go to Scan App > Settings.
- Check or uncheck the checkbox next to Create Unknown Shipments.
- If you are enabling the option, you will see a dropdown where you must choose which installation ID the unknown shipments will be added to. If you only have one installation ID this will be selected by default.
- In case you have multiple Action Centers linked to your installation, you can switch between them by using the drop-down list in the top right corner, below your user name.
Note:
All Action Centers created before the release of the "Create Unknown Shipments" option on April 2, 2019, have the option enabled as default. Action Centers created after April 2, 2019, must enable the setting if they want it.