Custom aggregations let your organisation create your own named groups over the dimensions you work with — such as countries, carriers, customers, and custom-uploaded fields — and reuse them consistently across the Portcast platform. Instead of relying on Portcast's static, one-size-fits-all groupings, you define groupings that match how your team is actually organised.
The most common use is defining your own regions: grouping countries into regions that reflect your network (for example, placing Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda together in an "East Africa" region), rather than using fixed regional definitions that may not match your routing, transshipment hubs, or service structures.
Key concepts
Before you start, it helps to understand a few terms:
- Aggregation — a named grouping configuration based on a single dimension. For example, "My Regions" (based on countries), "Key Accounts" (based on customers), or "Core Carriers" (based on carriers).
- Dimension — the data dimension your aggregation is built on, chosen once when you create the aggregation. It cannot be changed afterwards.
- Group — a named collection of values within an aggregation, such as an "East Africa" region containing several countries.
- Member — an individual value assigned to a group, such as "Kenya" within the "East Africa" group.
A member can belong to only one group within a given aggregation, and you can have one aggregation per dimension for your organisation.
Where to find custom aggregations
Custom aggregations are managed from the Aggregations page, found under Org Settings. Aggregations are configured at the organisation level, so the groups you create are shared across your organisation.
Creating a custom aggregation
Follow these steps to create an aggregation — for example, your own set of regions:
- Go to Org Settings → Aggregations.
- Click Create aggregation.
- Select the dimension your aggregation will be based on. To create regions, choose countries. Only dimensions that have data available for your organisation are shown. Note that the dimension cannot be changed once the aggregation is saved.
- Give your aggregation a name (for example, "My Regions"). The name must be unique within your organisation.
- In the group builder, click Add group and give the group a name (for example, "East Africa").
- Click the + inside a group to add members. Start typing to search the available values for your dimension, then select each value to add it (for example, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda).