Performance Improvement Considerations

Depending on specific ShipHawk customer account requirements, various options and settings can be changed to improve performance.

Some options that could reduce performance might be set for an account that does not need those options.

Be sure to review these considerations when helping a ShipHawk customer to get the best possible performance:

Review if ‘Allow book shipment before rating’ is required

The Allow book shipment before rating option (field name: allow_book_shipment_before_rating ) directs the system to NOT rate a shipment before booking for parcel carriers.

This option can be set for an account from the Edit Account page in aadmin.

If this option is enabled:

• The system will rate the shipment after booking in async mode. The Item Fulfillment (IF) write-back will be made AFTER the shipment is rated in background. The cost/price in NetSuite will be correct, but there may be an additional delay for the write-back (normally within 1 minute).

• If the customer is including the shipping cost/price in their document templates (for packing slips, carton labels, mil labels, and so on), the cost/price could be missing or incorrect. Most likely you do NOT want to enable Allow book shipment before rating for accounts that need the actual shipping cost accurately displayed by the document templates. In this case, consider removing the cost/price information from account's document template. The default document template includes the cost/price information, so be sure to remove that from the template if that information is not needed by the account’s use cases.

Reduce the number of carriers used by the account

The rating request process checks all the carriers used by an account, so the more carriers the account has, the longer the rating time for that account.

Further, the booking time depends on how many packages, SLIs (https://shiphawk.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SG/pages/10125532), and OLIs (https://shiphawk.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SG/pages/143425609 ) in an order.

Meet with the ShipHawk customer and review the number of carriers their account is configured to use.

If they have some carriers configured that they are no longer using, removing these carriers from the customer’s account in ShipHawk can improve performance.

Disable label-related settings if using Auto Print

The following settings in aadmin’s Edit Account page force the system to generate documents during a booking request:

• Include packing slips into labels (include_packing_slips_into_labels)

• Allow military labels (include_military_label_into_labels)

• Include Carton/Pallet labels into combined label (include_ucc_labels_into_labels)

For ShipHawk customers that have Auto Print enabled, consider disabling these settings because it will improve the performance of the booking endpoint. The labels will still be automatically printed, but they won’t be included in the “combined label document“.

Reduce the number of Shipping Policies and Rating Rules

Many Shipping Policies and Rating Rules can make the rating and booking process slower.

Are there any rules that were set up some time ago and are no longer needed by the ShipHawk customer?

Review the rules currently in place and consider disabling rules that are no longer required.

Remove URLs from packing slip templates

When defining a packing slip template, it’s possible to include a URL to an image file, such as the ShipHawk customer’s company logo. However, linking to images can slow down the packing slip generation process because of the time required to resolve the URL and get the image. Further, if there’s a connectivity issue and the URL cannot be resolved, the packing slip generation process is interrupted.