If you've ever run a service report, you may notice that many carriers seem to be falling short of their scheduled transit times. This week's update addresses two of the reasons for the low numbers in that report.

First, many shipments are not picked up on the day they're initially scheduled to ship. The tracking system has been expanded for several carriers to include their pick up date. When the application goes to the carrier's site to get the status of a shipment and the delivery date, it also records the pickup date if the carrier provides it. If the pickup date does not match the ship date on the BOL, an email is sent out to the creator of the BOL and anyone else who gets email notifications for that shipment. Recalculating the shipment will allow you to change the ship date if you want to. This could result in a different rate. Having the correct ship date on the BOL is going to help make the service report more accurate.

Second, a shipment often arrives late for reasons beyond a carrier's control. Weather, special equipment and appointment delivery are a few of the legitimate reasons for a delay. Now you can record that reason for a late shipment so that it doesn't count as late in the service report. Once a shipment is delivered and the tracking system determines that it took longer than the original service time estimate, you'll see a new item in the BOL tools on the shipment detail page. Go to the Tracing tab, click on the pro number of your shipment, then click Excuse delay. You'll see a list of possible reasons for the delay. "Not excused" is selected by default. If the shipment is excused, choose the reason or enter your own reason in the Other line and click Save. The excused shipments will no longer count as late when you run the service report.

Entering items for a shipment just got a little easier. When you choose a class for an item, the list of commodities is automatically limited to the commodities that match that class. Change the class back to blank if you want to see all of the commodities.