Understanding Order, Shipment, and Tour Relationship

In Orbit, an Order and a Tour are never linked directly. They are joined only through a Shipment — which is what lets one order's cargo spread across several tours.

Overview

Orbit keeps the two sides of a job separate. The Order is the commercial record — what the customer booked, who is billed, and the price. The Tour is the operational plan — the route, the vehicle, and the carrier who drives it. These two never reference each other directly.

They meet only through the Shipment: a single cargo move from one pickup to one dropoff. An Order groups one or more Shipments, and each Shipment is planned onto a Tour. A Tour therefore relates to an Order only by way of the Shipment it carries.

This indirect link is deliberate. Because there is no fixed one-to-one wiring between an Order and a Tour, the Shipments in a single Order can be split across several Tours, and one Tour can carry Shipments from different Orders — exactly what real-world routing needs.

Key highlights:

• Two planes, one join — The commercial Order and the operational Tour are connected only through the Shipment.

• Orders group shipments — An Order holds one or more Shipments, each a single pickup-to-dropoff move.

• Shipments are planned onto tours — A Shipment is planned onto a Tour, which carries the route, vehicle, and carrier.

• Flexible by design — Because the link is indirect, one order's shipments can be spread across several tours.

• From a tour back to its order — You reach the Order behind a Tour through the Shipment it carries; there is no direct shortcut.

How orders, shipments, and tours fit together

The relationship follows a simple chain:

• An Order contains one or more Shipments.

• Each Shipment is planned onto a Tour when it is scheduled.

• A Tour therefore relates to an Order only through the Shipment it carries.

Because there is no direct Order–Tour connection, to find the Order behind a Tour in Orbit MissionControl, open the Tour, look at the Shipment it carries, and follow that Shipment to its Order.

For what each of these objects is and the actions you take on it, see the dedicated Orders, Shipments and Tours articles. For how their statuses update as work progresses, see Order, Shipment, Tour & Leg Statuses.

When a shipment is carried in stages

Most shipments are carried straight through, and the chain above is the whole story. Where one vehicle cannot do the whole job, a shipment is carried in stages called Legs, and the chain gains a step: an Order contains Shipments, a Shipment is carried by one or more Legs, and each Leg is planned onto its own Tour.

This does not change the rule, it extends it. The Order and the Tour are still never linked directly. What changes is that a single Shipment can now span several Tours by itself, with different carriers on different days, rather than needing several shipments to do so. Your customer still sees one delivery.

See the Legs: How a Shipment Is Carried article for how a journey is divided into stages. If your organisation carries every shipment straight through, legs stay in the background.

A booking can arrive already routed

Usually a Shipment starts life Unrouted — sitting on no Tour yet — and you plan it onto a Tour yourself. But a booking can also arrive already routed, with its Tour created the moment the booking is submitted.

Whether this happens is a matter of configuration. Every booking form in Orbit is built from a TransportShape, and a TransportShape defines which objects it produces under its Outputs setting: Order, Shipment, and optionally Tour. When Tour is included in the Outputs, submitting a booking creates the Tour automatically alongside the Order and Shipment, so the work is ready to dispatch without a separate planning step.

When a TransportShape produces a Tour from a single booking, that booking's Shipment is planned onto the new Tour straight away — for that one booking, the Order, Shipment, and Tour line up neatly one-to-one. The underlying rule is unchanged: the Order and Tour are still joined only through that Shipment.

Example

A logistics coordinator at Orion Industries in Berlin takes an Order from ACME Ltd to move two consignments — one to Paris, one to Madrid. Orbit records this as a single Order with two Shipments. Because the two deliveries suit different routes, the coordinator plans the Paris Shipment onto one Tour and the Madrid Shipment onto another, each with its own carrier. The one Order now spans two Tours, connected — as always — only through its Shipments. When a colleague later opens the Madrid Tour in Orbit MissionControl and wants to know who is billed, they follow its Shipment back to the Order to find the commercial details.

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