How opening hours on a saved location — and optionally each dock — let Orbit schedule stops only when a site is open, set separately for pickup and dropoff, with a weekly pattern and date overrides.
A saved location — and, if you want, each individual dock within it — can carry opening hours. Orbit uses them to schedule stops only when a site is actually open, so you don't plan an arrival at a closed location.
Most places you collect from or deliver to are only open at certain times. In Orbit you record those times as opening hours on a location in the Address Book. Once they are set, Orbit takes them into account when scheduling a stop, so a planned arrival lands inside the hours the site is genuinely open. Opening hours are optional — a location with none set is treated as having no time restriction.
Key highlights:
Set per location — Each saved address can carry its own opening hours.
Per dock too — A loading point can keep its own hours, separate from the address as a whole.
Separate for pickup and dropoff — A site can be open to collect but not to deliver at a given time, or the other way round.
Weekly pattern plus exceptions — A schedule for each weekday, with date overrides for holidays or special days.
Keeps plans realistic — A stop's planned time window has to fit inside the open hours, so closed-site arrivals are flagged before they happen.
In Orbit MissionControl, open a Shipper's Address Book, open a saved address, and use Add Opening Hours or Edit Opening Hours. To give a specific dock its own times, set opening hours on that Loading Point. Managing the locations and docks themselves is covered in the Managing Locations & Contacts article.
Opening hours start as a weekly schedule: for each weekday you set whether the location is open and the time window or windows it is open. On top of that you can add date overrides for specific dates — to close for a public holiday, or to open with special hours on one day. An override for a date takes precedence over that weekday's normal schedule.
Hours can be set for a specific action. You can define general hours that apply to everything, or set different hours for pickup and for dropoff. When a stop is scheduled, the hours that match its action are used first; if none are set for that action, the general hours apply. So the same site can be open for collections at a time when it is closed for deliveries.
An address can define hours, and a loading point within it can define its own. When a stop names a particular dock, that dock's hours govern it — which may be narrower than the address's general hours. When no dock is named, the address's hours apply.
Every stop on a Tour has a planned time window. When you plan or adjust a stop at a location that has opening hours, Orbit compares the stop's window against the times the site is open. If the window falls when the location is closed, Orbit raises an Opening Hours Conflict and points out when the site is shut, so you can move the stop into an open time.
This is a scheduling heads-up, not an error: the plan and the opening hours simply don't line up yet. You resolve it by rescheduling the stop into an open window — a different time, a different day, or the matching action — rather than forcing it. It is exactly how Orbit keeps a tour from being planned to arrive somewhere that is closed. Whether a stop's window fits its location's hours also feeds the feasibility view described in Understanding the TimingGuide.
Opening hours are entered and read as the local operating time at the location, so the window you set is the one staff at that site would recognise on the clock on their wall.
A customer's warehouse in Kraków takes deliveries on weekday mornings only, and its east dock is tighter still — open for collections Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 12:00. An operator in Orbit MissionControl saves those dropoff hours on the address and the pickup hours on the east Loading Point. Later, planning a collection for Monday at 14:00 from that dock, Orbit flags an Opening Hours Conflict: the dock closes at 12:00. The operator moves the stop to Monday morning, the conflict clears, and the tour is planned to arrive while the site is genuinely open.
