Create New Work Orders in Excel

With the latest update of TrakIT, we've introduced a nifty new feature with which you can create any number of work orders by simply populating an Excel template and emailing it to TrakIT.

Here is a guide on how to go about this:

Go to the Home page in TrakIT and download the New Work Order Template document from the documents section.

It's a standard Microsoft Excel 2010 document (*.xlsx) that includes one protected sheet. This document forms the template for creating new work orders and the blank template looks like this:

This template contains some basic fields for new work orders that you can populate. More fields may be added in future versions of the template depending on your requirements.

Here is the description of the fields currently available:

Customer Code	Customer Code is a mandatory field and must match the Entity Code of the customer in TrakIT. The code specified here must be a unique code. Unfortunately, we currently have duplicate codes for some customers in TrakIT (these will be cleaned up soon). Codes that are not unique will fail.
Carrier Code	Code for the Carrier is also a mandatory field and must match the Entity Code of the Carrier.
Transport Document	Transport Document (or Shipping Instruction or Bill of Lading) is again a mandatory field. If this number is not available, it's not advisable to create work orders via Excel, as any temporary random number you might enter could already be a shipment in TrakIT and the new work orders would then belong to that shipment.
Container/Manifest No.	Depending on whether the shipment is containerised or break-bulk you can choose to fill in either of the fields or leave both blank. Container numbers specified here are not validated. If none of the fields are specified, TrakIT will create a TBAUxxxxxxx container number as usual.
Container Type	Choose Container Type from the drop-down list provided. The list matches the container types already available in TrakIT.
Size/Weight	Size of the container can be selected from the drop-down as 20' or 40' and the weight can be specified directly as a number (in kilograms). Both fields are optional.
Shipment Type	Choose Shipment Type from the list of available Shipment Types that will be available in TrakIT.
Seal Number and Commodity	Both fields are optional and can be entered as free text.

Currently, it's not possible to set the services for the work orders in this template. But we intend to include this in the template's next update.

Once you have completed the Excel sheet, simply email it to your designated TrakIT email address with the subject: TrakIT Create [Corridor Code]

For example, if you are creating work orders for Kenya-Mombasa corridor, your email subject would be: TrakIT Create KE-MBA

The subject of the email is not case-sensitive. Send the email only from your registered TrakIT email account and make sure that you have the correct authority to create work orders. Otherwise, the work orders will not be created.

TrakIT will process your email and reply with the result. TrakIT will inform you about errors encountered if any and the rows on which they occurred.

As this is the first release of this feature, we look forward to your feedback for improvement.

For any questions, concerns or suggestions, please contact TrakIT Support.

The Dashboard - Monitor your shipments...

The TrakIT Dashboard is a powerful tool to evaluate the performance of your corridors. It provides you with a graphical overview of your shipments, KPIs and event occurrences in an easy to comprehend manner.

There are various kinds of charts that you can add to the Dashboard for selected corridors, time intervals as well as trend intervals.

Similar to the Operations page, you can choose to customize the filters that apply to the Dashboard to narrow down to specific corridors, shipment types or other parameters. An important point to note is that filters apply to all charts simultaneously.




Types of Charts

Currently, there are 4 types of charts available in TrakIT. You can add as many charts as you want and re-order them as required. The source data for each chart can be exported to MS-Excel. Hold the mouse over a data point on any chart to display the figure behind it.


1) Work Order Creation - This chart displays a simple count of work orders that were created over a period of time for the selected corridors and for a specified trend interval.



2) KPI Average – This chart shows you the average time measured for the selected KPI against the average target time for the same KPI. It provides a bird's eye view of the trend/performance of a KPI and whether the time interval measured between the events is occurring within the target time.

You can add as many KPI charts as required.




3) Event Occurrence Trend – This chart shows the number of occurrences of a specific event over a certain time period and allows users to track the change in events happening over the time period. You can add as many charts as required.

When adding an Event Occurrence Trend chart, TrakIT will ask you to choose a specific corridor and event in that corridor. This is only done to obtain the event code of the event. The graph generated includes events with the same event code across all selected corridors (and not just the one selected when adding the chart).



4) Top 10 Pie Chart – This chart shows you 10 most active or most frequently used carriers, customers, corridors, shipment types and transporters. It also helps you identify other performance related information like which corridors/entities are most inactive or not used at all, which in turn allows you to re-analyze the requirement of such corridors/entities in the application and perform clean-ups.



You have the flexibility to choose your own charts independent of other users.

If you would always like to open TrakIT with the Dashboard (instead of the Operations) screen, just click the star icon  on the bottom right corner of the page to make it your default page. (But make sure the shortcut you use to start TrakIT does not directly link to the operations page, or else this won't have any effect).

For any further questions, concerns or suggestions on improvement, please contact TrakIT Support.

Generate forms for all Work Orders in Shipment

With the latest release of TrakIT, users can now choose to generate forms for all work orders in one go.

As you may already know, there are two kinds of forms available in TrakIT: those meant for single work orders and those meant for the entire shipment (with details of all work orders on the same form). The latter are, by default, shared across all work orders in the shipment.

This feature is applicable to forms that display information for a single work order only and only when you email the form (not download it directly). When you click on the Email button for a single work order form, the following window is shown:

At the bottom, there is a check box that allows you generate the same form for all work orders in a shipment. Once this check box is selected, the form is generated for and attached to each individual work order, and then emailed together in a single email.

The important point to note here is that any text fields in the form that are to be filled in by the user, will only be filled in for the currently selected work order and not for other work orders in the shipment. This is obviously because TrakIT cannot know the information that is required to be filled for other forms dynamically. So, this feature is recommended for forms where there are little or no dynamic fields.

Please note that using this function may take a lot of time to generate the email, especially if the shipment contains a large number of work orders.


If you have any questions of concerns regarding this feature, please contact TrakIT support.

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.

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.