About time in transit (TNT) estimations

Several Shipium products utilize a time in transit (TNT) calculation as part of estimating how long a shipment will take to be delivered to a customer, starting from the point at which it is shipped from a facility. This is a critical component of how we provide an estimated delivery date, or EDD. Delivery Promise, Fulfillment Engine, and Carrier Selection all incorporate usage of the TNT calculation.

Shipium offers three options for calculating TNT in order to suit your organization’s business needs best:

• Shipium calculated (recommended)
• Partner (customer) overrides
• Carrier defaults

Shipium calculated TNTs - Shipium’s recommended calculation

Shipium uses proprietary machine learning models on top of our large pool of shipment data to provide our best delivery date estimate.

Partner (customer) override TNTs

Your organization may have business reasons to choose your own provided TNT values for some of your shipping lanes, rather than utilizing Shipium’s calculated values.

Carrier default TNTs

You can choose to use TNT values provided by your organization’s carriers, such as UPS or USPS.

How Shipium applies TNTs to estimations

Shipium recommends an hierarchy that selects the Shipium-calculated TNT values, when no business rules specific to your organization's shipping lanes need to be considered. Thus, you would configure your TNT hierarchy as follows:

1. Shipium calculated
2. Partner (customer) overrides
3. Carrier defaults

However, your organization may need to prioritize internal business rules to be applied to TNT calculations. In this case, Shipium suggests structuring your TNT calculation hierarchy with your partner (customer) overrides being considered before any Shipium-calculated values:

1. Partner (customer) overrides
2. Shipium calculated
3. Carrier defaults

Examples

Shipment A from New York City to Seattle is evaluated. The shipment enters the hierarchy, selecting the Shipium calculated value of ‘4 Days’:

1. Partner override: ‘NULL’ (Your organization did not enter any optional partner overrides.)
2. Shipium calculated: ‘4 Days’
3. Carrier default: ‘6 Days’

Shipment B from Austin to Portland is evaluated. The shipment enters the hierarchy, selecting the partner override value of ‘8 Days’:

1. Partner override: ‘8 Days’ (Your organization provided a partner override.)
2. Shipium calculated: ‘4 Days’
3. Carrier default: ‘5 Days’