The Shipping Service is responsible to manage goods-out orders, those leaving the warehouse. In particular these kind of orders are typically customer orders, where each order has multiple order positions. The OpenWMS.org Shipping Service creates smaller chunks of each order position - the so-called splits.

A ShippingOrder is usually created by an ERP or HOST system that is responsible for planning and managing goods-out order. In this situation OpenWMS.org Shipping Service is responsible to schedule and plan orders as well as to allocate them. Allocation is a crucial part within an WMS and is in the responsibility of the Inventory Management.