May 2021

Planned Release to Production is May 25

Custom Order Type

The custom order type feature allows users to create one or more user defined order types that are subordinate to the primary order types of Pickup or Delivery. Once defined, custom order types may be used as filter criteria in the mobile client or Command Center Order Inspector, as criteria on Lead Time Rules or as exception/selection rules for Auto Assignment rules. 

Custom Order Types are defined from the Customer Order Type menu in the Client Portal by providing a name, source key and Icon. The name of the order type is how the order type will appear in any filter or selection criteria. The source key is expected to exactly match the Order:OrderSubTypeId attribute in the order payload and the icon is what will appear as the optional, secondary icon for the order.

In practice, Custom Order Types are subordinate to the primary order types of Pickup or Delivery and would be used anytime you may need to further filter order data. As an example, let's say we have separate team of people that are responsible for managing catering orders. With a Custom Order Type of Catering, you will be able to easily distinguish these orders from the Order list, while also allowing users to set filters in their clients so that they only see catering type orders. 

Container Estimate Overrides

When using the pre-printed label feature, ShopperKit relies on a rolling 7 day estimate to determine how many items by Food Safety Type will fit in a given container. While this method generally performs well when a store has a robust container order history, this can produce very odd results when launching new stores. With the Estimate overrides you may set a default count as well as Min and Max values by Food Safety Type. The default count value will be used when there is insufficient history to estimate the number of items that may fit in a container of the same Food Safety Type. The Min and Max counts will act as overrides to any system calculated estimates. To set the overrides you will need to define the ContainerEstimateOveride attribute at either the client or store level. Below is an example. 

[
  { "FoodSafetyTypeName": "Ambient", "DefaultCount": 5 },
  { "FoodSafetyTypeName": "Frozen", "MinCount": 2 },
  { "FoodSafetyTypeName": "Cooler", "MaxCount": 6 },
  { "FoodSafetyTypeName": "Bulk", "DefaultCount": 1, "MinCount": 1, "MaxCount": 2  }
]

Auto-Assignment enhancements

The auto-assignment functionality has seen several enhancements with this release. To start with, auto-assignment will now automatically ignore any order that has been previously assigned to a shopper via the Reserve Order option. Along these same lines, we have added a new Filter rule type that will allow you to define explicit exclusion/inclusion rules based on one or more custom order type values. The Limit Rule type has been updated to include total product weight as a limiting factor so as not to overload equipment. The Rank Rule type has also been updated to include the custom order type and Lead Time rule as potential ranking options. When using Lead Time Rule as a rank option, you will select the lead time rule name as the Rank Rule option. If the selected lead time rule is applicable to the order at the time of assignment, then it will be used as ranking criteria.

Edit Orders from Order Inspector

With this release it is now possible to enable order inspector to allow Managers and admins to either add new items to orders or edit items on an order. Items added to an order in Order Inspector are added differently than they are through the client application. When adding an item to an order in Command Center, the item is added in an unpicked status as though it came down from commerce vs. the handheld where the item is added and picked in a single transaction. Another key difference is that while the client application allows for adding items that do not resolve in the product lookup, you may only add items that fully resolve from command center. You will only be allowed to add items to orders that are New or In Progress and attempting to add an item that already exists on the order will result in an error. Similar to adding items, you may now also edit the order quantities and weights of items on the order. The items you edit must still be in a new status and the order must not be settled or canceled. Both of these enhancements are disabled by default. To enable this functionality you must set both the AllowCCEditOrder (to edit orders) and CCAllowAddItem (to add items) attributes to True.

Multi-select operations in Order Inspector

Another new update to the Command Center order inspector is the ability to multi-select orders to perform batch order actions, such as printing order summaries, changing promise time date or canceling/completing orders. Similar to how you would do in other applications, you will simply shift or command/control click the orders that you wish to select to highlight them. Once highlighted you will select the action option from the store level action menu. Please note that the action must be applicable to all the selected orders.

Customer Name and Order Type added to Order Inspector

One final update to the Order Inspector is that both customer name and order type have been added to the order list. This has been a common customer request and we're happy to finally get this out there.

Shorting Substituted or Added items removes from Order

This is a subtle yet important change. Previously if you were to add a sub item or and add-on item in ShopperKit and then later short the items to remove them from the order, those items would continue to appear on the order in a shorted status. This behavior had the potential to be a source of confusion with customers when reviewing their orders as they would see items on their order in a shorted status that they had never actually ordered. Now when removing previously added or substituted items from the order by shorting, the items are actually soft deleted from the order which effectively removes them order, leaving no trace of the items in any review or order summary views.

The following enhancement and fixes were all previously deployed in off-cycle hotfix deployments since the last release. These are identified here for reference.

April 29 2021

• Corrects how ShopperKit stores the access token when using AD authentication. Previously ShopperKit was storing it in the application cache and now it will be stored in session memory

April 20 2021

• Corrected Critical issue to only prevent out of tolerance weight picks if the PreventWeightToleranceOverride attribute is set to “True”.
• Correct issue involving estimated weights automatically populating the Weight screen instead of having Shopper input the actual item weight.
• Corrected issue involving an error message appearing on the Initiate POS screen that doesn’t clear after a successful PUT update.
• Corrected issue where items ordered by each but sold by weight and the estimated weight was pre-populating the Weight screen instead of requiring Shopper input.
• Corrected issue where not all the active messaging templates were visible in the Communications Hub in Command Center.
• Corrected issue where the Shopper adds or subs an item but then later shorts the same item.
• Added the extfield1 value as an attribute in the Staged Order screen in Command Center.
• Incorporated Shipt API v2 changes.
• Modified the Order Inspector screen in Command Center to show order pick progress by FST.

April 7 2021

• Corrected Critical issues with Active Directory integration in the ShopperKit Mobile app.
• Corrected an issue where orders would not load when shoppers had special characters in their names.
• Corrected an incorrect default weight calculation based on scanned input.
• Corrected unread message indicator to only show unread count for incoming messages from customers.
• Corrected an issue where Smart Sub rank choice selection was not getting recorded when selecting the sub item from the smart sub list.
• Corrected an issue where the prep item icon would appear on non-prep items.
• Increased the size of the icon for ID and Prep icons in picking flow.
• Made changes to the Order Summary printout from Command Center to include the POS recall barcode along with order type, Lead Time Alert and pass-through order field.
• Added a new feature that allows sub quantities to be forced based on the Smart Sub suggested quantity value.
• Added a new lead time alert “Print As Label” option that will allow a special custom label to be printed during container label printing for items or orders that trigger the alert.