Overview

With Products in Orbit, you can define the logistical products you offer to your customers, partners and suppliers. Similar to how parcel services offer various well-defined shipping products for parcels (Economy, Express, Courier, Premium, etc.) based on factors like size, weight, price, or transit times, Products in Orbit combine timing calculations, routing, feasibility assessments, commercial terms, and line-item based pricing. Orbit Products are applicable to all transport and delivery processes, not limited to specific use cases like parcels, last mile, or FTL/LTL.

Products are a powerful and flexible tool that allows you to accurately reflect your logistical and commercial offerings on the Orbit platform – in terms of pricing and service levels. Products can be used for selling (shipper-facing) and purchasing (carrier-facing) of transports.

Each Product has four key logic components, along with some additional configuration: Context, Feasibility, Pricing, and Scheduling. These logic components are called ProductBricks.

ProductBricks logic is defined using the TypeScript programming language to provide maximum flexibility while preserving maintainability. Orbit provides a feature-rich, built-in code editor that includes advanced functionalities such as code-completion and syntax highlighting. Orbit’s code editor is specifically designed to assist developers in efficiently managing and writing ProductBrick code.

While code is an excellent way to represent logic, most product logic also needs to access structured data at some point. This can be a zoning table with prices, a list of supported countries or simply a bunch of multipliers to use when calculating a price (e.g. for distance based pricing). Orbit DataPools provide the ability to store structured data and easily access them from within the logic of ProductBricks.

In the following docs article you will get detailed insight into Orbit Products and their components as well as some examples and snippets to get you started with products.

<aside> 💡 Creating and Managing Products requires basic programming knowledge. Specifically knowledge about the TypeScript or Javascript programming languages. If you want to learn the basics of TypeScript we recommend the following online course: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-typescript

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<aside> <img src="https://prod-files-secure.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/aea9fbc1-5555-464d-8914-965d631be46c/61e86ed6-35c6-4f25-9e8d-ad8fa75b9a7c/ORBIT-Brand-Logomark.png" alt="https://prod-files-secure.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/aea9fbc1-5555-464d-8914-965d631be46c/61e86ed6-35c6-4f25-9e8d-ad8fa75b9a7c/ORBIT-Brand-Logomark.png" width="40px" /> If you need any assistance with defining Orbit Products, please do not hesitate to reach out to your Orbit representative. They are available to provide you with the necessary support and guidance. Whether you have questions about configuring Product settings, integrating various functionalities, or troubleshooting any issues, your Orbit representative is there to help.

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Key Concepts and Features

ProductBricks

ProductBricks are the building blocks of Products in Orbit. There are four types of ProductBricks:

1. Context
   • The context brick runs prior to all other bricks of a product. It generates a context object that is accessible by all other bricks via the context parameter.
   • In general the context brick should contain logic that is shared by or used in multiple other bricks. Typically this includes: calculating a route, finding the correct vehicle class, etc pp.
   • A product must contain exactly one context brick.
2. Feasibility
   • Feasibility bricks determine whether the product can be used to create an offer for the transport request under given conditions.
   • Feasibility checks can differ vastly for different use cases. Examples include: Checking maximum load dimensions or weight, checking supported origin or destination countries, etc pp.
   • A feasibility brick generates a boolean (true/false) value signalling feasibility and optional error messages to explain to the user why the product is not feasible.
   • A product can contain multiple feasibility bricks, the results of which are combined using logical AND for feasibility values and list merging for error messages.
3. Pricing
   • Pricing bricks calculate the price of a product for a given transport.
   • In many cases pricing logic is either based on distance and/or time of the calculated route or a zoning table stored in a DataPool. But pricing bricks also allow pricing logic to have a completely different structure.
   • A pricing brick generates a list of line items. Line items are very similar to the accounting positions on an invoice. Each line item consists of count, name, monetary value and tax percentage.
   • A product can contain multiple pricing bricks, the generated line items are combined using list merging. The sum of all line items from all the pricing bricks of a product represent the price of the product for a given transport.