What is delivery booking

What sets a booking apart from a simple delivery notification is that it commits to a time. A notification says ‘we will come on Wednesday’; a booking says ‘Wednesday, 10:30, dock 4’.

What a booking contains

A booking usually contains:

• the time, meaning the date and time of the slot,
• the place of handling: a dock, a gate or another handling point,
• the registration numbers of the tractor unit and the trailer,
• the driver details needed to let them on site,
• the carrier, meaning the company responsible for the transport,
• the type of operation: loading, unloading or special handling,
• the order or document number that links the delivery to the purchasing process.

Sometimes the scope is wider, for example documents or scans, if the site requires them before entry.

Who creates the booking

A booking can be created in three ways, and usually several of them run side by side.

The carrier can create it themselves in a portal: the haulier logs in and picks a free slot. The work then moves from your logistics team to the company that knows most about the vehicle and the driver.

A booking can also be entered by someone at the site, usually in purchasing or logistics, once the time has been agreed. Without this route you cannot serve the carriers who will not use the portal.

The third route is bookings created automatically from orders in a higher-level system such as the ERP. That requires an integration, which is a separate project.

What delivery booking is for

Bookings spread traffic over the day. Without them everyone arrives in the morning, so at seven the docks are jammed and in the afternoon they stand empty. A vehicle with a booked time does not have to wait by the fence from dawn, so the queue at the gate gets shorter, and the warehouse knows how many deliveries are coming and when, and therefore how many people it needs on the shift.

Every booking also leaves a record: whether the carrier turned up, whether it arrived within the slot and how long the handling took.

Booking, time slot, YMS and awizacja

A time slot is the period for which a booking is reserved, so a booking occupies a slot. A yard management system (YMS) is a broader concept: it covers managing all the traffic on site, and bookings are one part of it. In Poland a delivery booking is called awizacja, a word you will come across when delivering to Polish sites.

The Polish word is also used to mean simply a notice that a delivery is on its way, with no reserved time, much as ‘pre-advice’ is used in English. So at the start of any conversation, agree which meaning you have in mind.

Delivery booking in TraxSystem

In TraxSystem a booking is a reservation of a slot at a specific dock, and the preparation time before and after the delivery is included in the reservation. The carrier creates it in the carrier portal, and the driver reports their arrival at the kiosk at the gate and gets a text message clearing them to enter. If nobody turns up for a booking, the system marks it as a no-show after a set time and frees the dock.

TraxSystem does not block a vehicle without a booking from entering: it shows the operator that there is no reservation, and the operator decides whether to let it in. Nor is it a warehouse management system (WMS): a booking plans the entry and the dock, and does not cover the contents of the trailer or stock levels.

Bookings are handled by the Bookings and warehouse module, which is added to the base system and priced by the number of loading docks. The limit grows with the size of the base package: up to 2 docks with the Start base, up to 6 with Standard and up to 20 with Extended. The amounts for each variant are on the TraxSystem pricing page.

Questions and answers

See also: What is a dock time slot · What is a yard management system (YMS) · How much does a dock scheduling system cost