In most cases, imports must be triggered manually. The reason for this is that orders often need to be vetted or modified before getting imported. Orders are usually imported into GroovePacker after you have reviewed them and held any that will not ship that day, maybe due to out-of-stocks, potential fraud, etc. In this way, only orders that are actually going to be shipped on a given day get imported and every imported order should be scanned without exception. Any orders that are imported and not scanned are exceptions that should be reviewed.
In a typical workflow, orders are processed in batches during the day. So 10-50 orders would be reviewed, their packing slips would be printed and then they would be imported into GroovePacker. The packing slips for the batch would be handed off to a picker/packer who would prepare the items to be scanned.
There are some exceptions to this. For example, in cases where orders are already vetted in another system and uploaded to an FTP server, we can assume that all orders on the FTP are finalized and ready to ship and GroovePacker can import them automatically.
If you have a very high volume of orders, and very few orders that are held for exceptions, it can often be beneficial to begin the import before the packer begins packing for the day. We have the option to schedule an import that runs at a specified time each day. If your packers begin work at 7 am, you should have the import begin at 6:45 am and the orders from the night before would all be imported before they arrive. Running another import manually, just before they begin would quickly bring in any remaining orders.
If you have a unique situation where orders need to be imported at regular intervals during the day we can setup a custom import server to import orders hourly. If you are interested in this option please contact support for more information.