Friday 2 August 2013

Global Data Search & KPI Filter

With the latest update of TrakIT, a few new features have been released:

Global Data Search

The global search function (on the top right side of the main menu), used to search work orders only on the B/L, Container Number, Manifest or Work Order ID.

It is now possible for TrakIT to search in Data fields that belong to a work order, provided you have specified that field as a searchable field. For example, if you have a Data field called "Truck Number", you can select it as a 'Global Search' field in the Corridor Definitions and it will be included in search results.


Once this is selected, TrakIT will search this data field and include any partially matching fields in the search results. Shown below is a search result for a truck number:


However, please use this feature very sparingly and only for unique fields with long numbers (such as Finance Reference numbers or Invoice Ref numbers). If too many data fields are included in Global Search, TrakIT may take a long time to search and the result may include lots of false matches (of which only the first 10 are displayed). Consequently, you may not be able to find what you are looking for.


Dashboard KPI Status Filter

A new filter for the KPI Status has been added to the Dashboard filters that affects KPI charts only.

Users can now choose to display All (default), Closed or Open KPIs only. Closed KPIs are those KPIs where both the "From" and "To" events have been populated and the KPI value is final. Open KPIs are those KPIs where the "To" event is not yet populated and the current date is being used to calculate the value of the KPI.


After selecting the option, click on the 'Search' button to update the KPI charts.


Work Orders Affected Count

When linking an Event or Data Item to one or more services and/or customers, you can easily check how many work orders your change will affect before you actually apply it to the work orders.

When you click on the 'Edit' function for an Event or Data item, the two "Additional Actions" you can apply also indicate the number of work orders that will be affected if the respective check box is selected.




TrakIT on Facebook

TrakIT is now on Facebook! For getting TrakIT news straight to your Facebook newsfeed, simply go directly to TrakIT's new page at http://www.facebook.com/trakit and click "Like"


For any questions or clarifications, please contact TrakIT Support.

Saturday 20 July 2013

Support for Foreign Languages

We're happy to announce that with the latest update of TrakIT, we have begun translating TrakIT in the user's own language.

Of course, as you may expect, this is by no means a small task - one that will take many months. But we have embarked upon this journey and will make sure we implement it to the extent where non-English speaking users are more than comfortable using TrakIT.

For the test phase of this project, we have picked Spanish and French and at the moment, only the main menus, some common buttons and some tab headers have been translated.

You can now change your language by clicking on the tiny flag at the bottom left on any main page:



This opens a window where you can choose your default language in TrakIT:


Once your choice is made, TrakIT will remember it until you or Admin change it.

Please note that all our translations are currently obtained from the internet and we're trying to source a native french or spanish translator. If you find a mistake or can suggest a better translation, please let us know so that we can correct it.

Also, please note that translations only apply to the user interface or to static text in TrakIT. For obvious reasons, user supplied data, such as corridor names, event/data names, work order remarks, new articles, etc. cannot be translated. Admins may consider localizing some event/data names if they wish to do so for their corridors.

We request TrakIT users to please let us know if they can provide us with translations to their native language. Any translation help is more than welcome!

Among other changes and fixes, a 'Sort By' field has been added to Advanced Report Subscriptions. A user can choose from one or more fields and the advanced report will be sorted by that field.


For any questions, clarifications or for offering translation help, please contact TrakIT Support.

Wednesday 26 June 2013

Understanding Services

TrakIT allows users to define services for a corridor. A service is basically a set of related events and data in a corridor. When creating new work orders, you may choose one or more services that the client has requested or the shipment demands.

TrakIT has a list of pre-defined services for each type of corridor (Import, Export or Round-trip). These are defined in Admin > Master Tables > Corridor Services. A service can also be defined as a primary service (that appears in bold). If you need a new service to be defined here, please contact your Admin or SysAdmin and they will create it for you.

Services are not automatically available in any corridor. Events must be linked to services explicitly in order for those services to be listed when creating a work order.

In order to understand services better, consider the following simplified sequence of events that have been defined in a corridor:



As you may see, Customs Clearance can be defined as a service and it will include events 2 & 3. And, you may have two more services: Trucking Direct or Trucking to ICD, of which only one must be selected (i.e, they will be primary services).

The pre-defined services in TrakIT can be linked to any Event and Data items defined in the corridor. In the above sequence, we would link events 2 & 3 to the service Customs Clearance. Furthermore, events 4 & 5 would be linked to both services Trucking Direct and Trucking to ICD. Event 6 would be linked only to Trucking Direct and event 7 would be linked only to Trucking to ICD. Accordingly, data items such as "Truck Registration" and "Driver's Name" should be linked to both trucking services. Each event in the corridor definition lists the number of services to which it is linked, as displayed below:



As you can see, events & data can be linked to more than one service. Events or Data items that are not linked to any service will always be included in a work order. The 'Services' filter on top lists all the services that the events are attached to.

Here is how our sequence of events looks like, after linking to the respective services:



When a user creates a new work order, the following services will be listed: Customs Clearance, Trucking Direct & Trucking to ICD. Depending on the selection of services, the relevant events will be added to the work order.

For example, if no service is selected, only events 1 & 8 will be available in the work order. If only Trucking Direct is selected, event 1, 4, 5, 6 & 8 will be used and so on for other services.

A user may change the services selected for an active work order at any time - however, this may lead to some events being removed or added, so it must be done very carefully.


Ideally, services should be selected while creating a work order. Avoid changing services later as this may lead to loss of populated events and data.

The services selected for a work order can easily be exported in Custom or Advanced reports as well as the Operations page export.


For any further questions or clarifications, please contact TrakIT Support.

Saturday 22 June 2013

Interface Update & Other Changes

Important Notice: If you are getting a "Page Not Found" error when opening TrakIT, please delete any existing bookmarks and open TrakIT directly via the url. This is due to some internal page structure changes.

For any assistance, contact TrakIT Support.
A new version of TrakIT has been released with the following changes:


Interface Update

Over the past few weeks, we have been working on streamlining TrakIT internally and enhancing the user interface to make it cleaner and simpler. The first phase of this transition is complete and we have made some changes to the way tables are displayed and the way users interact with tables. The majority of the change in internal and invisible. However, this has resulted in an average of 30% - 50% lighter pages (which translates directly to faster performance).

The standard Edit and Delete buttons (along with any other) on each row have been moved to a popup that opens when you hover over the menu icon.

Shown below is an example of the User Management page and the popup menu:


The same has been applied to all the other tables. The page size of a table has been moved to the footer.

Updates have been made to some pages only; the remaining ones will be updated in the next phase.

If you experience any issues with the new interface, clear your browser cache, close all windows of your browser and then try again. If that doesn't help, please let us know.


Demurrage Notifications

As per your request, Demurrage Notification emails will now have an Excel Attachment instead of the content being included in the email.


Advanced Report Filters

A few more filters have been added to the Advanced Report 'WO Created' filter.


These filters will filter on the WO Created date on "rolling" basis from the current date.


Internet Explorer 7.0

Over the next few months, we will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 7.0 due to the amount of time it takes our developers to ensure that the application looks and runs fine in IE 7.0.

IE 7 users will now see a small exclamation icon on the top left of the browser window as a notice to upgrade. If you are using IE 8 and still seeing the icon, check your Compatibility View settings and make sure you are not using TrakIT in Compatibility mode (Turning on compatibility mode makes IE 8 behave just like IE 7).

For those of you using IE 7, please contact your local IT support to upgrade to IE 8 or later and make sure Compatibility Mode is turned off.


For any questions or concerns, please contact TrakIT Support.

Saturday 8 June 2013

New Report - Event Update Delay

A new interactive report "Event Update Delay" is now available with the latest release (build 84). This report allows you to select specific corridors and analyse the time delay between the occurrence of an event and the time at which it was updated in TrakIT.

Furthermore, for each event, you can see the users who have updated the event, their average delay and maximum delay. This will help in determining any data update bottlenecks in the shipment workflow.

The delay is measured in days only. If a user updates an event on the same day as the occurrence of the event, it would mean a delay of 0 days. If the event is updated the next day, the delay would be 1 day and so on. The figures below include the number of events updated by each user and the average delay (in days) with one decimal.

Shown below is a screenshot of the report.


"Info Only" events, such as "ETA Vessel" are not  included in the grouped Average Delay for the corridors. Such events are marked with a asterisk (*).

As with all interactive reports, you can click on the hyper-linked figures to drill-down into the source work orders.

The report can be exported to MS-Excel and includes all source data.


For any questions or clarifications, please contact TrakIT Support.