Configure business rules for shipments

To help streamline your organization’s Turvo experience, users with Admin-level permissions and above can configure tenant-level rules via the Admin console. The below article describes how to configure Route, Shipment lockout, Status, Autopilot, and Auto-transition shipment rules for the Shipments in your tenant.

Protip: Information on configuring the other business rules available in the Admin console can be found in the following articles:

• Locking shipments from changes
• Locking orders from changes
• Configuring business rules for carrier accounts
• Configuring business rules for customer accounts
• Configuring business rules for users
• Configuring business rules for payments
• Configuring business rules for emails

Important note: We recommend updating rules during low-use hours, or when minimal users are using the system. Rules can be updated at any time, but low-traffic hours help ensure a low risk of rule implementation clash.

Autopilot exceptions vs Business rule validations

It’s important to note that the Autopilot section is the only part of the page that is used to automate the creation of exceptions, which can be viewed and resolved within the shipment or via Workbench.

The rules toggled using the Configurations section trigger Business rule validations. When an update is made to a shipment that corresponds to a business rule, Turvo will block the change if the rule is violated, an error message will appear, and a Business rule validation event will be added to the shipment’s Timeline tab. No exceptions are created.

Locating Shipment rules

1. Navigate to the Admin console by clicking on your profile icon in the top right corner of your dashboard and select Admin console from the drop-down menu.

2. Click the Rules card.

3. On the Rules page, click the Shipment header in the column to the left, if not already selected.

Configuring Shipment rules

Shipment tenant rules are split into sections for Configurations, Autopilot, and Auto transition shipment. Click any of the section headers to expand the section and begin configuring your rules.

• The Configurations section contains segments for Carrier Offer, Documents, Min/Max Pay Restriction,Rating, Route, Shipment Secondary ID, Shipment lockout, Exception lockout, Shipment updates, and Status.
• The Autopilot section provides the ability to configure Autopilot rules for shipments.
• The Auto-transition shipment section provides the ability to create and manage auto-transition rules to move shipments from one status to the next automatically once certain criteria have been met

Important note: It can take up to 30 minutes for a rule to take effect in Turvo. Once a rule is enabled for your tenant, the rule will be locked from future changes for up to 30 minutes. You can view whether a rule is locked by the notification to the right of the rule line. 

To unlock the rule, click the circular arrows to the right after the displayed time has passed.

Configurations

The segments contained in the Configurations section allow you to configure rules that modify shipment automation and requirements.

Carrier Offer

Use the Carrier offer section to dictate whether users can add cost items to the offer and whether to prevent the carrier from making a counter quote to the provider offer. To enable these configurations, toggle them to the ON position and click SAVE.

Documents

The Add documents for each stop rule toggle within the Documents segment will dictate whether users are allowed to add Bill of Lading (BOL), Proof of Delivery (POD), or other documents to each stop on a shipment.

To enable the rule, click the toggle to the blue ON position and then click SAVE to save your changes. 

Min/Max Pay Restriction

This section allows you to prevent requested shipment costs from exceeding the max pay value of the margin. 

To enable the rule, click the toggle to the blue ON position and then click SAVE to save your changes. 

Rating

If the Auto-rate carrier payable toggle found in the Rating segment is ON, upon adding a carrier to a shipment, Turvo will check for contracts or global rates for that carrier that can be applied to the shipment, and then automatically add the preferred rate to the carrier’s payable costs in the shipment’s Details tab > Carriers block > Costs segment.

Protip: See our article, How to assign a contracted carrier rate to a shipment, to learn more about manually and automatically assigning carrier rates to shipments.

To enable the rule, click the Auto-rate carrier payable toggle to the blue ON position and then click SAVE to save your changes.

Note: Turvo uses the settings in your tenant’s Admin console > Settings > Shipments > Rating segment to determine which contract or global rate is “preferred” and should be used on the shipment. To learn more about configuring the Rating settings, see our Help Center article on Understanding and updating tenant settings.

Route

The rule available under the Route segment of the Shipment configurations allows users with Editor level permissions and above to add or remove route segments from shipments in your tenant. 

To enable the rule, click the Route segment update toggle to the blue ON position and then click SAVE to save your changes. 

Note: After each configuration is saved, you’ll see the Update rules? pop up. It’s important to note any rules enabled or disabled will affect your entire tenant. You can choose to force all users in your tenant to refresh in order to apply the changes using the provided checkbox. We recommend forcing all users to refresh their browser to apply the changes to keep rule implementation consistent across users. To continue with the setup, click YES.

Shipment Secondary ID

The rule available under the Shipment Secondary ID segment allows for the visibility and configuration of a secondary ID while viewing the shipment card.

To enable the rule, click the Configure the secondary ID of a shipment toggle to the blue ON position and then click SAVE to save your changes.

Status lockout

In Turvo, you can configure a certain status at which a shipment will lock from further changes. For detailed information on configuring the rule, which fields are locked by status, and an example of the workflow, see our Locking shipments from changes article. 

Exception lockout

This rule prevents shipment updates by specific user roles when a shipment has a defined exception. For detailed information on configuring the rule, which fields are locked by status, and an example of the workflow, see our Locking shipments from changes article. 

Important Note: When shipment lockout is enabled and you attempt to make an API call, your API calls may fail. You must resolve any exceptions in order for your API calls to go through. 

Shipment updates

The rules available under the Shipment updates segment allows you to configure when a user tries to update a shipment, Turvo will check for the driver or dispatcher's contact information, prevent non-Admin users from updating shipments in a Completed status, prevent cancelation of paid shipments, restrict shipments with pending accessorial charges from moving to "ready for billing" status, and allow drivers to start their shipment within a specific time prior to the shipment pick up time.

To enable the rules, toggle to the blue ON position and then click SAVE.

Status

The rules available under the Status header allows Turvo to automatically move a shipment to Covered and Route complete once particular requirements are met. 

To enable one of these rules, toggle the Auto-update shipments to Covered status or Auto-update shipments to Route complete to the blue ON position, then click SAVE to save your changes.

Once enabled, the rules will perform the following updates to shipments across your tenant:

• Auto-update shipments to Covered status: When a carrier is assigned to a shipment change status to Covered for shipment, if the carrier is removed from a shipment in Covered or Covered and Dispatched status, change the shipment status to Tendered.
• Auto-update shipments to Route complete: When all routes are completed, shipment status automatically moves to Route complete.
• Email link at specific status of shipment: When a shipment is created, this toggle determines whether the email link checkbox displays in the Create Shipment modal.
• Prevent users from skipping stops: When a user skip stops while updating a status, force them to update skipped stops timestamp.
  • Notes:
    • If stops are skipped for a certain route segment, the POST button is disabled and a message is shown, “Please update the missing stops to proceed.”
    • If the status is moved to Canceled, the user is not required to update stop time stamps.

Autopilot

To streamline the creation of exceptions, Turvo allows Admin and Super admin users to create automatic exception rules within the Rules section of your Admin console.

Rather than manually adding exceptions on each individual shipment, you can define up-front rules to automatically trigger an exception once the criteria is met. Once created, these exceptions will surface on the Exceptions tab in Workbench to help make the organization and updating of exceptions easier.

For additional details on the automation logic, how to create autopilot rules, and how to update rules, see our Autopilot: Automatic exception rules article.

Auto transition shipment

To cut down on time spent manually posting shipment updates and to reduce failures to update shipment statuses, Turvo allows users with access to the Admin console to create automatic shipment status transition rules within the Rules section. Rather than manually updating the status of each individual shipment, you can define up-front rules to automatically trigger a shipment status change once the shipment has spent a specified amount of time in the original status indicated in the rule. 

For additional information on how to create and manage these rules, see our How to create automatic shipment status transition rules article.