> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.usenash.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# What is Nash?
> A brief introduction to Nash and how it can help your business.
Nash is a delivery orchestration platform enabling your business to offer reliable delivery. Nash instantly connects with a large number of fleet providers and drivers. We provide these services through the Nash Portal, and programmatically through the Nash API to **create and manage instant and scheduled delivery jobs**.
## How it works
To get the most value from Nash, it is important to understand how your specific account can be configured mainly
through the following features.
* **Dispatch Strategies** Choosing optimal provider to fulfill the job.
* **Automations** Business rules to choose the best Dispatch Strategy based on job information
* **Notifications** Define triggers to send messages to end customers or internal systems
* **Tracking Customization** Look and feel of tracking links that you can send to end customers
When the account is set up, and orders are starting to flow in, there are three logical phases in the Nash delivery lifecycle:
Submit an order to Nash
Choose your delivery providers and set dispatch strategies
Monitor and track your deliveries throughout the delivery process.
### Phase I: Order Ingestion
Starting point for Nash is to process information about a potential delivery. This happens through creating an
*order* in Nash. An order can be created directly from the Nash Portal, uploaded by CSV in the portal, or
by using the [Create Order](/api-reference/order/create-order) API endpoint.
Once the submitted information is validated, the output will be a list of quotes from providers that are eligible to
fulfill this delivery.
### Phase II: Dispatch
The dispatch phase is the collection of actions that solve for deciding which delivery provider to send the job to for
fulfillment. Nash leans heavily on using **Dispatch Strategies** to make this decision. These strategies are configurable in
the Nash portal and guides the decision engine in Nash to select the most appropriate provider for a job.
A job can be submitted to Nash with a specific dispatch strategy, or the user can take advantage of [**Automations**](/api-reference/dispatch-strategies/dispatch-automations)
to
map specific business rules to desired strategies. For example, for jobs with value greater than \$200 use strategy
A otherwise use strategy B. This is the recommended path since it simplifies the implementation of the Nash API and moves
complexity of managing dispatch strategies to the Nash Portal.
The last approach for dispatch is to send a job to specific provider manually. This can be achieved in the Nash Portal
or through the API by using the [Select Quote](/api-reference/job/select-quote) endpoint.
The result of this phase will be a job dispatched to a delivery provider. At this point, we have a *delivery* object.
### Phase III: Monitoring and Tracking
Third phase of the job lifecycle is to monitor it as it progresses through the statues list until it reaches a terminal
state. Nash builds scalable monitoring tools in the Nash Portal to enable the live monitoring of thousands of concurrent
jobs. We recommend using the Nash Portal as the central operational tools to take action on live jobs.
In addition to the Nash Portal, users can consume our API endpoints to systematically process information about jobs in real-time.
In use cases where you need to consume real-time information the best path is to process our [**webhooks**](/reference/webhooks).
In addition to the standard set of webhooks, Nash enables the user to define custom notifications that trigger a
webhook alert for operational triggers relevant to the use case. Example, send a webhook when the courier
is running more than 10 minutes late.
View the API reference documentation