New TrakIT Enhancements

In the latest release (build 96), some cool new features have been implemented to give users improved functionality and increased transparency.

Updating Event & Data for the Shipment

Users can now view or update a particular event or data field for multiple work orders belonging to the same shipment with same or different values in one go. This cuts down update time drastically when the same event or data field has different values for each work order. Users don't need to go into each work order to update the field.

When you open any work order that is a part of a shipment with multiple work orders, the event and data fields of the work order appears as a hyper link. Clicking on the event/data field name opens up the following popup:



Here, you can see the selected event for all work orders in the shipment. You can update the event corresponding to any container as required, just like a regular event update in TrakIT and click on the 'Save' button.

To copy the event date/remarks to other rows, select only those containers that you wish to copy to (by selecting/deselecting the check-boxes) and click on the icon (Copy to Selected) on the row from which you wish to copy. For example, if there are 30 work orders in the shipment and you wish to update the event for only 15 of them, just select those 15 rows, enter the event in any one row and click the icon for that row to copy the data to the other 14 rows.

Event fields cannot be updated out of sequence (unless allowed in the corridor), and this may differ for different containers belonging to the same shipment. The same validation process applies as when updating events normally.


Demurrage Fields from Container Tracking in Custom & Advanced Reports

You can now add Free Days, Actual Days and Demurrage fields to your custom or advanced reports that are created by work order, to predict and monitor detention. In the Export Fields tab select the 'Source' as Header and select the  fields as shown below:

The data is, of course, obtained from the Container Tracking module. The work order in question must be active in the Container Tracking list, otherwise no figures will be populated.


Event Completed Count option for Custom & Advanced Reports

You can now add the count of work orders for which a particular event has been completed to Custom and Advanced reports created by B/L, as shown below:



While creating/modifying an event field, the 'Select Option' menu gives you the option to choose 'Event Completed Count', which when selected will display the count of work orders for which this event has been completed. Using this in conjunction with the 'Total WO' field, you can check whether a particular event has been completed for all work orders in the shipment.


For further queries on the above features, please contact TrakIT Support.

Broadcasting Messages

Do you wish to inform all users / customers / transporters / agents about some general information or something urgent? TrakIT allows you to do just that...

The Broadcast Messages feature allows Administrators to broadcast a message (along with an optional attachment) to a group of people. This group can be all TrakIT users, customers, transporters and agents of specific countries. 

Go to System > Broadcast Messages to see the list of all the messages that have already been sent out along with the date and time of their broadcast. Click on the message to view the details and the recipients it was broadcast to.

Here is a sample message:

Broadcasting a Message
Click on the 'Create New' button to create a new message for broadcast. The following window appears: 

Under the Recipients section, select one or more Entity Types, User Roles and From Countries. Enter a subject in the Subject section and information that you need to broadcast in the Content section. If you need to attach any document with this message, you can do so by selecting a file to include with the message (max 1 MB). Once the message is ready, click on the Send button and the message will be emailed to all the selected recipients.

Note: If you have selected any of the Entity Types as recipients, then you are allowed to select a maximum of four countries.

For further queries and questions about this feature, please contact TrakIT Support.

Slow loading Advanced Reports?

Over the past few weeks, we've discovered that some Advanced Reports were "hogging" the system and slowing performance. Additionally, these reports were being sent out twice or thrice daily...

As an example, a report was generating about 19,000 rows with 24 columns of data - that is about 456,000 data items in one single report! The resulting Excel file was a few megabytes in size and was being sent out daily.

Upon investigation, we found that the filters for the subscription were set incorrectly, thereby causing large amounts of data to be included in the report.

With the latest update of TrakIT (released last Saturday), we've included a way to measure how long a report takes to generate. Under the Advanced Reports subscriptions, you will see a column "Last Gen" that indicates the number of seconds that the report took to generate the last time it was sent or manually generated.

We've also added a filter for system admins to identify long running reports. Take a look at this screenshot:

The "Generation Time" filter is currently visibly only to System Administrator - but it will be made available to all admins shortly.

We recommend you go through your subscriptions to see how long the last report took to generate. If you find the figure missing, it will be updated the next time your report is sent out.

For any questions or clarifications, please contact TrakIT Support.

Two New Reports...

It has been a little longer than usual since the last TrakIT update. Here is the summary of the major changes incorporated in TrakIT's first update of 2014:

Operations Page Filters

The Operations page is the "control center" of TrakIT. It's filters are of paramount importance in finding your shipments quickly. We have tweaked the filters to improve the way TrakIT searches shipments.

Corridor Filter - The "Single/Multiple" selection of corridors has been removed. TrakIT will now detect if a single corridor is selected in the multi-select list and act accordingly.

Other Filters - All other filters are now dependent on the main corridor filter and can change their available options based on the corridors selected. Users will now see only those options that are actually used in their corridor and not the multitude of items in the list. For example: if a user has the Carrier filter enabled, the list of carriers will only include those carriers that have been used in the selected corridors.

When changing corridor selections, it is important to click the icon below the corridor list to refresh all other filters based on the corridor selection.

The filters will, as usual, retain their selections as well as get refreshed as per selected corridors when the page is loaded again.


Demurrage Statistics Report

A new interactive drill-down report has been added. Users can choose specific corridors and see a summary of containers that are presently being tracked in the Container Tracking module as well as the total demurrage figures. Below is a screenshot of Demurrage Statistics Report:

 The following columns are available in the report:

Corridor - Name of the corridor.
Containers - Number of containers currently being tracked.
Average Days - Average number of days for which containers have been tracked.
Maximum Days - Highest number of days of any container that is being tracked.
Average Demurrage - Average rate for each container that is being tracked.
Total Demurrage - Total demurrage for all containers being tracked.


Shipment Status Report

The Shipment Status report provides the number of work orders at each stage of the shipment, i.e. the number of work orders with particular events. Users can select corridors and the complete count of all work orders for each event of those corridors is displayed. Events that have no work orders are excluded from the report. Clicking on the WO Count number drills down to those work orders. Below is a screenshot of Shipment Status Report:

The Oldest and Latest events indicate the number of days since the first and last occurence of a particular event.

For further queries or concerns, please contact TrakIT Support.

Tracking Demurrage in TrakIT

Container Tracking is a module in TrakIT that displays the list of all containers that are being tracked between the defined entry and exit events. Based on set parameters, the days elapsed and demurrage is calculated for each container.

Setting it up

For every corridor, users can set demurrage rates for a specific carrier, shipment type, container size and container type. Slab days and rates can be set if the demurrage rates vary with time.



Demurrage rates set here do not have any effect on their own. They are applied only to containers that are present in the Container Tracking list.

Container Tracking

Admins can set specific events in a corridor to be the Entry and Exit events for Container Tracking. When an Entry event is populated in a work order either directly or via email/bulk update, the container is added to the list of active containers if it is not already present there. Allowed free days are copied from Demurrage Definitions section of the work order that caused the entry of this container and the number of days are counted from the time of entry, which is the same as entry event date/time. TrakIT then starts calculating demurrage on this container on the basis of the criteria defined in Demurrage Definitions. 

Conversely, when a user populates an Exit event, TrakIT checks if it is an active container in the Container Tracking list. If so, the exit date is set, final demurrage is calculated (if applicable) and the container is "exited" from the list. 

This is displayed in System>Container Tracking:

Demurrage definitions and exit work order number and date for a particular container entry can be modified by clicking on the menu icon beside it. 

The Entry and Exit events may belong to same or completely different corridors. For example: Entry event would be in an Import corridor and Exit would be on the Export.

The list can be exported as an Excel sheet as per the selected filters.

Notifications

Users can subscribe to notification emails by selecting System > Email Notifications > Select Corridor and clicking on the 'Free Days' tab as shown below:



These notification emails are sent out by TrakIT every morning. The email contains an attachment that lists all the containers with Free Days already expired along with calculated demurrage provided demurrage rates for the corridor were set and containers about to expire as per the above settings.

Users can also be subscribed to demurrage notification emails by administrators via the Corridor Definitions > Demurrage Definitions section.



Subscriptions made by admins are automatically reflected in the user's Email Notifications and subscriptions made by users in Email Notifications are reflected in the Notifications section in Demurrage Definitions.

Using the Container Tracking module, users can keep track of their containers along with the demurrage applicable on them in a very easy manner. For any questions or clarifications, please contact TrakIT Support.