Infigo Academy:
We have changed the way our Delivery Countdown module is implemented, and have made it both more user-friendly and more powerful.
Rather than being configured per product, we have created two new menus:
Catalogue > Products > Production Restrictions
Configuration > Resources > Manage Calendars
We have also added new features and options to other pre-existing menus, which will be covered later in this article.
Production Restrictions
Production Restrictions are a way of allocating the amount of time it takes to produce a product, as well as which days you can and cannot work on the production of the output. For example, if your office is shut on weekends and you will have nobody around to operate the machines,
Production restrictions are now configured against either the product variant directly OR the product group if it is being used.
Rather than a series of tick boxes for you to define the production restriction on a per product basis, we have introduced a more global concept - you setup your restrictions by heading to Catalogue > Products > Production Restrictions. Now in here you can create as many combinations as you desire; you then apply this restriction at either the product or product group level.
Product Restrictions effectively serve as sets of saved delivery countdown configurations which can be applied to multiple products at once.
Below is the configuration of your "Example Restriction" production restriction, and I have listed out what the settings do underneath:
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Name
This is simply the name of the production restriction.
Deadline hour
This is the deadline for the order, and functions as you have used it before. Effectively, any orders placed after this hour (on a 24 hour clock) will have their execution start on the following day, adding another day to the delivery time.
Execution offset (days)
A product may take 24 hours to manufacture due to several components, so if you typed 1 in to the field, it would then add an additional day for production.
Execution offset Tiers
As above, except it allows you to increase and decrease the execution offset based on the quantity ordered.
Skip Monday...Sunday
These days are used to mark which days you are not able to work on the production of the output, such as weekends if the office is shut, and will update the delivery countdown estimation accordingly.
Calendar
One of the new concepts is Calendars. Effectively, you are now able to assign days on the calendar wherein you are not able to work on production, such as public holidays. By assigning a calendar to the restriction, the restriction calculation will now take all configured calendar days into account.
Calendars
To configure a calendar, you simply need to navigate to Configuration > Resources > Manage Calendars.
Here, you can create new calendars by clicking "Add new record", giving the calendar a name, and clicking "Insert":
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Once you have created your calendar, you can click "Configuration" and then you are able to mark the days you would like to designate as non-execution days on the calendar screen which appears by simply clicking on the days.
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You can identify designated days by the blue circles, and you can name the days and mark them as recurring, meaning that they will be taken into account each year.
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This gives you far more control over your available days, and you can enable or disable the delivery countdown timer at a product or product group level, as well as select the production restriction using the settings shown in the screenshot below (these can be found on the product variant or product group configuration pages):
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Delivery Restrictions
We have also introduced a new feature called "Shipping Restrictions" which can be found under Configuration > Shipping > Shipping Restrictions which not only allows you to control which countries are allowed to use which shipping methods under the "Country Restrictions" tab, but also allows you to create Shipping Restrictions.
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You create Shipping Restrictions in much the same way you create Production Restrictions (Add new record -> Name -> Insert), and the configuration is practically the same, except there is no tiered offset option, and the allocated calendar will affect delivery days, not execution days:
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Once you have configured your Shipping Restriction, you can apply it to a shipping computation method by navigating to Configuration > Shipping > Shipping Computation and clicking the "Rules" button against the computation method you want it to apply to:
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In here, simply choose the Delivery Restriction you have created from the dropdown, then click Save.
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We have also added the option to set a default Delivery Restriction which applies to products that do not have a restriction configured, and the option for it to show in One Page Checkout. These can be found under Configuration > Settings > Shipping Settings.
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Checkout
You can also have the delivery estimation appear in the One Page Checkout (OPC) by enabling the setting "Show Order Delivery Date in OPC" which can be found under Configuration > Settings > Shipping Settings.
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With this enabled, the "Shipping method" step of one page checkout will show three dates: The date ordered, the date it will be dispatched, and the date it will be delivered. Below is an example of if a product was ordered on a Thursday before the execution offset, with 2 days of execution, 3 days of delivery offset, and Saturday and Sunday being skipped for execution. This will cause the system to calculate that the product will be ready for collection on Saturday, but since execution is skipped on Saturday, nobody will be there to hand it over to the delivery driver, so the item will be dispatched on the Monday after it was ordered (day 5 of the order process, when counting the order date as day 1), and then the 3 day delivery offset will have it delivered on the Thursday (day 8 of the order process, when counting the order date as day 1).
Other References
This delivery countdown will now affect the "Delivery Date" in other areas of the system, such as in Shared Print Operations where it will set the "Due Date" to be the dispatch date:
This will also be passed through any MIS plugins you may have configured on your storefront, allowing for interaction between the delivery countdown and your MIS integration.