Find Urgent Orders That Are Not on a Mission

1. Purpose

To find overnight and expedited orders that have not yet been waved onto a mission, in time to pick and ship them before the carrier collects. The information needed to do this is already on the Orders screen, but the two columns that matter are hidden by default, so most people open orders one at a time instead.

2. Scope

Covers finding and waving individual urgent orders on the Orders screen. Does not cover clearing a backlog by order age, which is SWI-016, and does not cover changing the service an order ships on.

3. Roles & Responsibilities

4. When you need this

Use it in the last hour before a carrier pickup, to catch anything expedited still sitting unwaved. Use it after a busy import, when orders have arrived faster than missions were generated. And use it whenever a customer asks why an overnight order did not go out the same day, because the answer is usually that nobody saw it.

5. Key concept: carrier is not service

This is why urgent orders get missed even by people watching the Orders screen closely.

So the rule is: turn on Mission and Service Method once, save the view, and never open an order to answer either question again.

6. Procedure

1. Open the Orders screen.

2. Click the eye icon at the top right of the table. This is the column picker and it is easy to miss, because it sits above the table rather than in it.

3. Tick Mission and Service Method so both columns appear.

4. Apply the mission filter and choose Not on a mission. This is the filter doing the searching, rather than you scanning the list.

5. Filter or sort by service method to bring the expedited services to the top. The list of services is long, because it carries every service every connected carrier offers, so sorting is usually faster than scrolling the filter.

6. Select the orders that need to move and generate a mission from the bulk actions.

7. Save the view using Saved Filters before you leave the screen. One saved filter per urgent service works well, and it turns this whole procedure into a single click tomorrow.

7. Verification

Do not treat generating the mission as the end of the job. A mission that exists is not the same as a mission that has been picked.

Confirm the orders you selected now show a mission number in the Mission column, and that re-applying the Not on a mission filter no longer returns them. Then check the mission appears on the Missions screen and is actually assigned to someone, because an unassigned mission sitting in a queue will miss the same cutoff the orders were about to miss.

8. Constraints and caveats

There is no express or ground grouping on service method today, so a saved filter for each service you genuinely watch is the practical approach. Asking for a category filter has been raised with the product team.

An order with no service method usually means the channel sent nothing recognisable. Treat those as needing a look rather than as not urgent, because they are the ones most likely to be misrouted.

Service method is what the channel asked for, not what will be bought. If your organization runs automations that rewrite the ship method, check those before concluding an order is not urgent.

9. Worked example

A 3PL asked for a way to see which orders were already on a mission without opening each one, and then for the same on service method, because overnight orders needed spotting before the FedEx collection each afternoon.