Hi! This tutorial is to step you through how to process a received order through production and dispatch, completing it and notifying the customer who sent it.

For this you’ll need a sample order to work with. If you haven’t got one, use our Single Item Order Sample to get a sample order to use.

Handy (but optional) is a USB barcode scanner if you have one, if not, we can enter barcode values manually.

Finding your Order

Okay, lets go find our sample order. Go to the Orders Page and use the filters or the search tool to find your order. Note our orders status, if its status is dataready then connect is still in the process of fetching and checking the production files.

Once our order is printready click on it to open it and view its details.

Reviewing Your Order

Now we’re on the order details page. Here you can view the structure of our order, including the items listed by shipment.

Note the live status of the items and the shipment, this indicates that the items haven’t been completed and the shipment has not left the factory yet.

Each item has 1 or more components which are the things you’ll need to produce. Each one has a production file and will get a job sheet so we can track it. Click an item to expand out its components, you’ll be able to see the components attributes and thumbnail. Click the thumbnail of the file to see its properties, here you’ll find options to re-fetch or modify your file in PDF Studio if you need.

Use the Print Job Sheets and Download Files buttons at the top of the page to download the PDF files for your order and be sure to Print off the Job Sheets, we’ll need them later.

Processing Your Order

Let’s go to the Work List. At this point, we are impersonating the user running the print room, so you’ll see a list of the items you need to produce, in order of when they are due to be dispatched. Select a few items, see how the menu bar at the bottom of the page allows you to create job sheets or complete the items.

To complete our item, you can either find it in the list or scan the barcode of one of the jobsheets we printed, while on this page. If you don’t have a barcode scanner, you can enter the barcode value in the scanner.

Note that we get a modal for just our item, this way we can find and complete items quickly without the need to search the list.

At this point we would print our item and send it through the factory with the job sheet. The job sheets would detail the item and the attributes necessary to complete it. We’re going to assume that this has happened and we are the production completer at the other end of the process with a finished item.

Feel free to complete our test item and see that it disappears from the list. If your test order has other items, use the job sheets to complete these as well.

Despatching Your Order

Now that our production team have produced our item(s) we can return to the order list and imagine we are a person working at goods out. I will have been handed some finished items with worksheets.

To find our order, you can locate it in the list or scan/enter the jobsheet barcode. You’ll be taken to the order details page for the order. Note that the status of all items (and therefor the order) has changed to complete.

Scan the jobsheet barcode again and note that our item becomes highlighted.

If there are more items in our order, these can also be scanned to demonstrate that we have all the parts of our order necessary to despatch it.

Once we’re happy that we have all the shipment parts we can make a note of the address and despatch methods of the shipment and click ship to start the dispatch process.!

You’ll be asked to confirm that you definitely wish to ship this and then asked for an optional tracking code if the shipping method allows one.

Click ship and see that your shipment status has updated to shipped.

Congratulations, you’ve successfully completed your Connect order! The customer who placed the order will be notified and any triggers you set will now be Sent!

Please see the Site Guide if you’d like more information on any of the pages covered in this tutorial!