Monday 1 September 2014

Work Order Creation Notification

Up till now, users could receive email notifications when Events/Data fields or KPIs were updated or documents were uploaded in TrakIT. With the latest update, you can now receive email notifications when new work orders are created in selected corridors.

Go to System > Email Notifications and select the appropriate corridor. Click on the 'WO Creation' tab. The following will be displayed:



Select from the 3 available options: No Email Notification, Immediate Notification and Daily Notification. Immediate Notification will enable users to receive an email notification within half an hour after the work orders are created. Daily Notification will enable users to receive a single email notification at about 5am UTC. This email will include notification for all work orders created for the selected corridor(s) since the last notification.

Administrators can also select users to receive WO Creation notification emails for their corridor. Go to Admin > Corridor Definitions and select the appropriate corridor. Select the 'Work Order Creation Notification' option as shown below:

Now click on Add User. A new dialog box will open up as follows:



Type in a few characters of the user's name whom you wish to notify, select the user from the list of users, select the type of notification and click on Add.

For further queries, contact TrakIT Support.

Friday 15 August 2014

Advanced Reports get more advanced

Advanced Reports have been greatly improved with the latest version of TrakIT. A number of options offering finer control over report generation have been introducded.

Alignment, Separators & Sorting
Users can now add various formatting features at field level. When creating or modifying a field, 3 new options have been added, as shown below:



Here is an explanation of the fields:

Alignment: Users can now choose or force the alignment for every field in the report for greater legibility. Fields can be left-justified, right-justified or centre-aligned. If no alignment option is chosen for a field, the formatting may be differ based on the type of data. For example, Excel will align numbers to the right and text to the left by default.

Separator: Data displayed in the reports can be grouped or separated in two ways:
  • Select 'Group' option if you want the data grouped by a specific field. The field appears as a full row and is removed as a column. Sorting on this column takes precedence over other fields.
  • Select 'Sheet' option if you want to completely separate the tables based on a specific field. In HTML, the table is split into several tables. In Excel, several sheets can be created based on the field value with each sheet representing one value of that column. The maximum limit of sheets in 100.

Sort Priority: Users can select up to 3 levels of sorting for their reports. For any field, they must select the sort order as appropriate: 1st, 2nd or 3rd. Report fields will be displayed as per the sort order.

These formatting options used on report fields will reflect across all subscriptions. Please note that these formatting options have no effect whatsoever on subscriptions where the Report Type is CSV. CSV, by definition, cannot contain formatting information.

Highlighting updated Events/Data
Another feature added is the ability to highlight events or data fields in the report that have changed recently. This can be controlled for each subscription. When creating or modifying a subscription, you can choose one of the options shown below:



If selected, the relevant fields are highlighted in a light red color. If the first option "Since last Report emai" is chosen and the last report email was sent more than 7 days ago, no fields will be highlighted. This feature is only valid for Event and Data fields and not applicable to Header and KPI fields. Again, this highlighting will not work for CSV reports.


For further assistance or queries, contact TrakIT Support.

Thursday 7 August 2014

Kewill Import for Damco

Note: This article is valid only for Damco TrakIT users

TrakIT can now import shipments from Damco's Kewill Freight Forwarding system (KFF) using a specially designed Excel template. This enables users to create and update shipments in one go.

Shown below is what the Kewill TrakIT Template looks like:



Users simply need to fill up the excel file with their shipments. TrakIT will automatically create new shipments (work orders) or update existing shipments. Each line in the excel sheet refers to a shipment and not a work order. Thus, each line in the excel sheet can create or update one or more work orders with the relevant data.

The Excel template has the following fields. An explanation of the fields is also provided on the second sheet, titled "Guidance", in the work book.

Corridor Code: Specify the Corridor Code here as it exists in TrakIT. New work orders that are created, will belong to this corridor.

Customer Code: The code specified here must match the customer code as defined in TrakIT. The Shipper/Receiver field of new work orders will be assigned to this customer.

Kewill Booking Number: The booking number specified here will be assigned to the new work orders.

Container Count: Specify the number of containers/work orders to be created (or updated) here.

Transport Document: It must be provided if present in KFF. If left blank, an auto generated number prefixed with 'TBA' will be assigned.

Carrier Code: Provide a code that exists in TrakIT.

Container Numbers: Enter comma separated container numbers here, otherwise auto-generated numbers prefixed with 'TBAU' will be assigned to the work orders. The number of containers here must match the Container Count column.

Container Types: Provide comma separated values for container type codes here. The number of codes here must match the Container Count column.

Shipment Type: The specified shipment type will apply to all new work orders being created.

Commodity: Specify the commodity that will be assigned to all work orders.

Shipper Code: This field (if available in the Work Order Data) will be filled with the value provided here.

Consignee Code: This field (if available in the Work Order Data) will be filled with the value provided here.

Kewill Export Job Number: This field (if available in the Work Order Data) will be filled with the value provided here.

Kewill Import Job Number: This field (if available in the Work Order Data) will be filled with the value provided here.

All the fields are not mandatory. Specifying only mandatory fields will also suffice.

Once the Excel template has been completed, just email it as an attachment to trakit@damco.com with subject as TrakIT Kewill Import. After a few minutes, you will receive a response email from TrakIT with the result of the import for each line in the Excel sheet.

For further queries or assistance, please contact TrakIT Support.


Monday 21 July 2014

Workflow Instructions for Event and Data fields

Among a number of minor changes and fixes, a new feature has been added in the latest update that was released yesterday. Workflow Instructions enables users to receive instructions for events/data by email shortly after they have been populated or updated.

Administrators can set up these instructions for each event or data item in their corridors and also select the recipients for the instructions.

In Admin > Corridor Definitions and select the corridor for which you wish to set up event workflow instructions. Under the Work Order Events/Data tab, click on the menu icon for the desired event/data and select "Workflow" option, as shown below:



The following popup appears once you select the "Workflow" option:


In the 'Select Users to Notify' box, enter the names of the users whom you wish to notify about the workflow instructions and under the 'Specify Workflow Instructions' box, write the workflow instructions for the users (which can be up to 500 characters). The selected users will be informed about the workflow instructions and the work orders in which this event has been updated/modified.

For further queries please contact TrakIT Support.

Tuesday 24 June 2014

Major Change for Container Types

With the upcoming update of TrakIT (build 100), to be released on the 29th of June (Sunday), a major change will be implemented with respect to the way TrakIT handles container sizes and container types. It is important that you go through this article thoroughly and understand the implications and impact of this change.

These changes affect two fields in the work order header - Container Size and Container Type. The Container Size field can currently have value of 20' or 40', or it can be blank. The Container Type can currently have one of the following values:
  • General
  • Insulated
  • High Cube
  • Flat Rack
  • Tank (Gas)
  • Tank (Liquid)
  • Open Top
  • Reefer (Live)
  • Reefer (Dry)
  • Half-Height
  • Platform
The default Container Type was 'General' and you can set the Container Type to any one of the above choices.

In order to align TrakIT with industry ISO standards, the Container Type field will be changed to store the standard ISO Code of the Container Type.

ISO 6346 is an international standard covering the coding, identification and marking of inter-modal (shipping) containers used within containerized inter-modal freight transport. The Size and Type Codes section in the document will now be used by TrakIT to identify the container type and size.

As the Type Code includes the size of the container, the Container Size field in TrakIT will become a read-only field that will be populated automatically when the Container Type is set. Furthermore, the Container Type field in TrakIT will be non-mandatory.

The complete list of the Container Type Codes can be seen in Master Tables > Container Types. Some of these codes are set as "common" and appear in bold. These codes appear first in the list of codes.

The existing Container Types selected in Work Orders will be mapped to the new container codes as per the following table. It is possible the below mapping is not 100% correct for all work orders as there isn't a one-to-one correspondence with the new codes.

Old Container TypeNew Code for 20'New Code for 40'
General22G142G1
Insulated22HR42HR
High Cube25G1L5G1
Flat Rack22P142P1
Tank (Gas)22TN42TN
Tank (Liquid)22TN42TN
Open Top22U142U1
Reefer (Live)22R142R1
Reefer (Dry)22R142R1
Half-Height28G148G1
Platform22P342P3

Selecting a Container Type Code for a Work Order is straight forward. When editing the Work Order Header or creating new work orders, click on the Find link next to the Container Type text box as shown below:



A popup (shown below) opens up with the common container types listed. Click on a code to select it and insert the code into the text box. If the container code required is not a commonly used code, click the Show All link to see the full list of container codes.

As before, you can choose to apply the code to the specific work order or to all work orders in the shipment.

Once the container type code has been entered, the length of the container is automatically set as per the code.


Impact of Changes
  1. Custom & Advanced Reports - All Custom reports and Advanced reports that have the Container Type field present will now export the new code instead of the old one. The Container Size field will remain unchanged and will accordingly export the correct length of the container as per the code.
  2. Corridor Demurrage Defintions - The existing demurrage rate settings will apply to the 20' and 40' containers as applicable. If non-standard container sizes are used (i.e. other than 20' or 40'), demurrage rates will not apply if the particular size has not been defined in the Demurrage definitions for the corridor. Additionally, the Container Type field will be removed from all Demurrage definitions and rates will only apply on the size of the container.
  3. Container Size field has been removed from New Work Order creation page - both for Form Input and CSV input.
  4. Container Size field has been removed from the Edit Work Order page.
  5. All export of work orders will now include the new code for the Container Type field.
  6. A new field called 'Container Type Detail' has been made available to Custom & Advanced reports. This field will provide the description for the container type for the relevant code.

Other Changes in TrakIT

Other notable changes in the new update:


  • The Carrier is now an optional field for Work Order creation.
  • Default date filter for Advanced reports has been increased to 6 months (from 3 months). The default date filter is only applied when the WO Status filter is not being used.
  • A Booking Number field has been added to the WO Header - This field is populated only when work orders are created by an external system.
  • The Global Search feature has been modified to exclude closed work orders. It will now return only active work orders.
  • Several other minors fixes and improvements...



For any questions or concerns, please contact TrakIT Support.