About Soft Appointments
Soft appointments are non-confirmed appointments that can be used to help plan capacity at dock doors, helps define carrier capacity and reduce lead times. Soft Appointments can be created when a shipment is in the Awaiting state. Example: A DC knows that a shipment is going to arrive on a certain day, but does not yet know who the carrier is. The DC can create a soft appointment, reserving the dock door, reserving a soft for whichever carrier arrives with the shipment.
Once the carrier is determined, the carrier can select an appointment from available dates that are set by the soft appointment. Once the carrier selects a time slot, the appointment can be moved to confirmed. To prevent soft appointments from filling all of the available appointment times, soft appointments have expiration dates which cause the soft appointment to expire after a certain period of time.