It’s that time again! It’s time for another major release, with major improvements and new features for you and your operations. If you missed what happened in our last release, you can read about it here.
Here are some things you’ll find in our winter release:
Meet the new and improved Requisitions module
Since we released Helm CONNECT in 2016, our Requisitions module has been one of the areas we wanted to improve the most. Based on your feedback, we’ve now vastly expanded requisitions to better support purchasing workflows, making it a more powerful tool for requesting parts, services, and managing costs across your fleet.
In this release, you’ll see key improvements like:
- Create cost-based approval gateways
Want to limit your staff and crew’s ability to order parts or services over a certain price point? In this release, you can add an approval gateway with a dollar amount for all roles. Requisitions needing approval are marked with a new ‘Awaiting Approval’ status. - Link requisitions to any item
Previously, you could track requisitions related to tasks and corrective actions, but we know that you also want to link requisitions and purchase orders to other activities that need parts or labor. With this release, you can link requisitions to inspections, maintenance routines, inventory counts, and forms. We also made it easier for you to search and find the items you want to link with your requisitions. - Request labor more easily
We made it easier to request labor in a requisition. Now, when you are entering items in a requisition, you can toggle between part fields and labor fields. When you switch a line item over to labor, you’ll see a labor description field instead of the parts list, and an estimated price in $/hour, instead of $/units. - External numbers on line Items
A few releases ago, we made it possible to number each requisition automatically. In this release, we expanded our auto-numbering system to apply a unique number to each line item in a requisition, so you can now link the line items as well as the requisitions to a purchasing system outside Helm CONNECT. - Split and manage partial shipments
Now you can handle split and partial shipments. Split a line item to record the items that arrived and track the remaining items in a new line item. You have the option to copy any notes and attachments from the original line item to the spit line item. - Organize the line items in a requisition
You can now move and organize the line items in a requisition by price, type, vendor or whatever makes sense to you.
To learn more about all the improvements to Requisitions, check out this article.
Advanced Search is here
In our previous release, we made our powerful new Advanced Search functionality available to our early adopters. In this release, we’re making it available to everyone. Shore-side maintenance and compliance users will now have access to Advanced Search. In our next release, coming in early 2019, the Advanced Search tabs will replace the Details tab in Overview, on the Maintenance menu. We encourage you to work with your account manager to take advantage of this new feature. To learn more about what Advanced Search can do for you, check out this article.
Meet self-managed assets
Helm CONNECT Jobs was designed with centralized asset dispatching in mind but, in many ports, assets manage their own dispatch and order tracking and/or handle dispatch for other assets. In this release, captains can now create, edit, and complete orders right on their assets as well as send orders to other assets working in the same area. This huge, powerful change lets users take advantage of Helm CONNECT Jobs in almost every situation. To see this feature in action, please contact your account manager.
The new Trips tab allows captains to dispatch orders from their asset
Streamlined reporting filters
To make reporting in Helm CONNECT faster, easier, and more stable, we made some important changes to our report filters. Previously, not all report data sources had date range filters. Now they do. Also, to ensure your report data loads quickly, we limited the date range to 366 days across all date filters. Of course, you can still report on all your data, this just means you can only select up to 366 days at a time in a particular report. As always, you can export your data to Excel, Power BI, or other tools for visualization and analysis. To learn more about these new date range filters and how to select data across more than one year, check out this article.
Easily update crew groups
For our Helm CONNECT Personnel users, we know you want to make adjusting crew groups faster and easier. In this release, we’ve made your wish come true. Now, you can promote or edit a crew person’s position and add or remove them from crew groups right from their personal record in People under the Management menu. To learn more about this feature, please contact your account manager.
Completed audits are now available onboard
This is another highly requested item from our crews: “I need to show detailed audit reports to auditors when they are standing onboard my asset.” We’ve made that happen. Now, when an ‘asset’ audit is completed in the shore-side Audits module, the audit results and corrective actions appear in your asset’s onboard history. Perfect for you and your auditor. Check out this article to learn more.
View audit history onboard the asset
That’s it. Another major release to keep you warm through the winter. Check out the release notes to see all the details. And we’re working on our next set of releases that we’ll roll out in the new year.
We hope you love the new features! Please keep giving us feedback so we can build the stuff you need. To learn more about what’s coming in Helm CONNECT 1.13, check out this post.
Happy Holidays and Happy Helm-ing!
