Order Journeys

An order journey is a way of defining the life cycle of an order. A journey consists of a set of milestones that are key points in the order's journey, for example, when the order is placed, when the shipment is delayed, or when it has been delivered.

Each milestone is defined by thresholds that must be met for the milestone to be considered reached. These thresholds can be based not only on events from the transporter but also on events from other systems, time constraints, and more. This approach makes the journey a very powerful and flexible tool for keeping track of what happens to the order.

Each shipment of the order will be described by its own journey, which allows you to keep track of multi-shipment orders as well. A single shipment can also have multiple journeys, which allows you to define one journey that is presented for the end-customer, one for triggering notifications, and one for statistical purposes, etc.

To learn more about how to use order journeys using our API, please refer to our order journey API documentation.

Milestones

A milestone represents a key point in the order journey. Some examples of milestones are:

• Order received - The warehouse received notification about the order.
• Order delayed - The transporter notified us with a delay event or more than X days passed without it being picked up.
• Delivery after promised delivery time - It has been delivered but it was after the promised delivery time.
• Shipment is going to Norway - Norway is the destination country.

It's worth noting that a milestone can belong to multiple journeys, allowing you to easily reuse the same key point to mean different things in different contexts.

Milestone completion

Once a milestone is completed, it stays completed — even if the thresholds that triggered it later become false.

For example, if a time-based threshold as part of a milestone is met (e.g. "3 days since latest event"), both the threshold and the milestone are considered reached when it has been 3 days since the latest event. But if a new event comes in after that and resets the clock, that specific threshold is no longer met and is therefore marked as such. That doesn't affect the milestone's status — it remains marked as completed.

Conditions and thresholds

Milestones are reached based on defined thresholds, such as transporter events, time constraints, or order and shipment properties like the destination country. To learn more about configuring events for transporters or other systems, please refer to our events documentation.

Thresholds are grouped into conditions, which determine milestone completion. A simple milestone might have one condition with one threshold, while a complex one could include multiple conditions and thresholds. For example, an "order delayed" milestone might check for a delay event and whether X days have passed without pickup.

You can specify whether all or any thresholds in a condition must be met, and whether all or any conditions must be satisfied for the milestone to be considered reached.

Threshold Types

Skrym supports several types of thresholds to enable flexible milestone definitions:

• Event-based thresholds - Triggered when specific tracking events occur (e.g., delivery, delay, pickup events)
• Time-based thresholds - Triggered based on time constraints (e.g., "3 days since latest event")
• Property-based thresholds - Triggered based on order or shipment properties (e.g., destination country, transport method, shipment or parcel counts)
• Milestone-based thresholds - Triggered when another milestone is reached

Numerical property thresholds are particularly useful for orders with multiple shipments or parcels. For example, you might want to mark an order as "Partially Delivered" when at least 2 shipments have been delivered, or "Ready for Pickup" when all parcels are available.

Numerical properties support the following comparisons:

• Equal to a specific count
• Not equal to a specific count
• Greater than a specific count
• Less than a specific count
• Greater than or equal to a specific count
• Less than or equal to a specific count

The numerical property can be based on either:

• Number of tracked shipments in the order
• Number of tracked parcels in the order

Count Threshold Considerations

• Handling for count thresholds: Before enabling count-based thresholds (especially parcel counts), verify parcel handling for each transporter you use. We have occasionally seen duplicate parcels caused by mismatched incoming references, which can skew counts.
• Order-level count behavior in milestones: For order-level count thresholds, the threshold state can change as counts change, but milestone state does not revert once completed. Example: shipment count <= 1 can become unmet after a second shipment is added, while the milestone stays completed.

Triggers

When a milestone in a journey is reached, you can trigger some action. These allow you to react to what happens to your orders and can help you notify your customers or update your internal systems. To learn more about setting up triggers, please refer to our triggers documentation.

Default journey

To get started, Skrym provides a set of predefined milestones that can be used to define the journey of an order:

These milestones are assigned to you by default during onboarding and Skrym creates a default journey. This means you can start using them right away without any additional setup. You can simply track an order and assign the predefined journey to it.