Consignments

Consignments are the key component within the (TMS) Transport Management System within CartonCloud, any job that occurs on the transport side is called a consignment. A consignment can have many fields to record information against, such as your customer reference number, the consignment type, whether it's a pick up or delivery, the items within the consignment and the number of items and their dimensions, plus many other options based on your operation.

Being able to automate consignments coming in and having CartonCloud automatically allocating the consignments to a driver can reduce admin overheads by as much as 60%. Moreover, having your drivers using the mobile application allows them to navigate to the destination and to easily collect an electronic proof of delivery, including attaching images and any documentation against the job.

In a typical transport business consignments are received through manifests or through paperwork which staff have to then go and key into their system or into an excel spreadsheet. Within CartonCloud we use tools called parsers to automatically import manifest and consignment information so that no more data entry is required.

One of the really cool things about consignments is that once you've got this job created in the system, it then appears on the mobile phone. Your customers can see the status of that consignment. You can attach documents to that consignment such as documents like dangerous goods declarations or photographs of the stock or of when the delivery was made.

So the consignment itself acts as a primary record with all of the history about everything that happened to it throughout its life cycle. From the moment that you picked it up from a customer to the moment that it got delivered. It acts as your source of truth if your customer ever wants to inquire about a certain delivery, 3 months, or 3 years down the track. It's easy, just ask for their reference, search in our "search for anything bar" and CartonCloud will bring up the record immediately.

The other great thing about CartonCloud is that you have options. If you're only doing a dozen jobs a week and want to manually key in jobs in that's fine and you can even give your customer access so they can enter the job online. However if you're dealing with larger volumes we can get your consignments automated easily through our parsers or API integrations.