Beginning from its creation, an inbound shipment flows through a set of transactions and statuses until its completion. This chain of transactions and inbound shipment statuses is called the inbound shipment pipeline.
The inbound shipment pipeline provides Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation with a means to perform actions, such as sending notifications or logging alerts, dependent on the location of the inbound shipment in its pipeline. It also provides you with a means to track an inbound shipment from creation to delivery.
The inbound shipment pipeline from which your business runs is unique to how your system administrator has set up your business environment. However, every inbound shipment pipeline generally begins with a transaction that creates an inbound shipment and ends with a transaction that indicates an order has been delivered.
A transaction is an occurrence that needs to be tracked and can call certain actions to be performed. A inbound shipment status describes what state an inbound shipment is in and moves it from transaction to transaction.
The statuses that an inbound shipment can flow through in the default inbound shipment pipeline of Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation are: