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.

Saturday 25 May 2013

New Dashboard & Other Changes

With Build 83, the following changes have been implemented:

Dashboard

The TrakIT Dashboard has been changed from Flash based charts to Javascript based charts that render faster and on all browsers. This means you can now view the dashboard on your iPad too (Flash doesn't work on Apple devices).

The KPI graphs now include the Target line to compare the KPI with. Note that the target is the average of the targets set for the KPI among all selected corridors.



Non-standard Weekends

For countries with non-standard weekends (e.g. Saudi Arabia), KPIs in business hours will now be calculated correctly.

Now, you can select the weekend days for any country with non-standard weekends in the System > Country Holidays page. You can also set the public holidays in your country to let TrakIT skip those days when calculating Business hours.


Make sure your KPIs in the corridor definitions are also set to the correct country and time zone to enable the correct calculation of business hours.





Advanced Report - Date Filter

By default, the Advanced Reports do not include work orders where the last event is more than 3 months ago. This can now be over-ridden using the new 'WO Created Date' filter in the Advanced Reports filter.

You can choose from a list of options available. The first three options allow you to set specific dates, whereas the other options use the current date as the reference point.

If this filter is not used, the default limit of 3 months is applicable.


Custom Messages for Custom & Advanced Reports

For each report subscription (customer, user or advanced), you can now specify a personalized message to be included in the report emails that are sent.



A maximum of 500 characters are allowed in the message.



Many other changes and fixes are included in this release. For any questions or queries, please contact TrakIT Support.

Monday 13 May 2013

Demurrage Notifications, Report Field Options & Time Zones

Build 82 has been released yesterday and it brings great new features as mentioned below:

Demurrage Notification Emails
User can now choose to receive daily notification emails when a container is about to reach the allowed Free Days beyond which Demurrage charges become payable, by selecting free days expiry notification in the application.

From the main menu, select System > Email Notifications. Select a corridor for which you wish to receive notifications and then click on the 'Free Days' tab.


Notifications are sent every morning and include all containers with Free Days already expired as well as those that are about to expire as per above setting. The email includes links to the Entry Work Orders and calculated demurrage (if any), provided that the demurrage rates were set.

Administrators can also subscribe users to demurrage email notifications via the Corridor Definition > Demurrage Definitions section.




The subscriptions made by admins are automatically reflected in the user's email notifications and vice-versa.


Custom & Advanced Report Options and Time Zones

TrakIT Reports will now include many options for exporting events and data in Custom and Advanced Reports. When adding an Event field to the list of fields, users can now choose from the following options:



Event Date Only - This is the default setting for all existing events. Only the event data is exported. Example: 10 May 2013
Event Time & Date - Both time and date of the event is exported. Example: 19:55, 10 May 2013
Event Updated Time & Date - This is the time and date that the event was actually last updated by a user and not the event date/time itself.
Event Updated By - This provides the name of the user who last updated the event.
Remarks Only - This option will export only the remarks entered by the user for the event.

To get multiple options for the same event in the same report, simply add the same event many times to the field list, each time with a different required option.

Data fields have similar options for export. 

Important Note: When time is exported in a field, it is set as per the corridor time zone (for Custom Reports) or the time zone set for the subscription (for Advanced Reports). Corridor Time Zones can be set in the Corridor Definitions for a corridor.


Work Order Weight

The Weight field of a work order is now not a mandatory field. If not entered, the weight will simply be set as 0 kgs.

Thus, you can create new work order by simply specifying the B/L details of the shipment and then selecting the number of containers/work orders to create.




For any questions or clarifications, please contact TrakIT Support.