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 nShift Portal. An unknown shipment is created when a Scan App event is uploaded to nShift 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 nShift 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 not produced in your own nShift book and print solution, 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 Portal 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. To change this setting access must be activated under the Usage Profile on your user. If your owner account does not have access, please submit a request to nShift Customer Service to get access. If you have an admin or regular user, please request access from the owner.
Any user with access to an Action Center and with access enabled under the Usage Profile can update the settings of the Action Center.
Note: If you have an owner account and would like to give admin access to other users, please reach out to nShift Customer Service.
Follow these steps to enable/disable the creation of unknown shipments:
- Log into nShift Portal with your Owner profile or a user that has access to manage unknown shipments.
- Go to Track > Action Center > 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.