GilaMonster,

No testing has been done yet as I'm in a "merged" logical and physical design phase.

I'm probably hesitant of using the lookup table with a FK relationship because of the previous system I used had a huge MUCK table. Of course I wouldn't design it like that but it just begged the question if I can reduce the amount of joins why not? Joining 5+ tables to get a whole overview of a single shipment is cumbersome but there is a lot of data to be displayed and I don't know it's unavoidable.