Hey everyone! I’m Cooper Barry, Director of Product Development, and I’m excited to highlight some great features in our latest Helm CONNECT release – version 1.8! If you missed what happened in our last release, you can read about it here.
Assign tasks to multiple assets
One of our most requested features is the ability to assign a task to multiple assets – quickly and easily. Now you can!
From the Maintenance Overview, when you click the New Task button, you can assign the task to one, some, or all your assets. Need your entire fleet to do something important? You can now assign tasks to each and every asset from one place.
Track part usage on checklists and forms
One of the coolest things you’ll see is the ability to consume parts on maintenance routine and inspection checklists, and on forms.
In your template builder, you’ll see a new Part Usage control. Add this control to a template as many times as you need and select the specific parts. When your crew completes the checklist or form, they enter the quantity of parts used.
Now your people can track and report on parts used on every checklist and form in Helm CONNECT. And if you subscribe to our Inventory module, your inventory quantities will be updated every time a checklist or form is submitted.
Track part prices and update inventory with requisitions
We added a whole new dimension to our Requisitions module. When you create a requisition, you can now see the estimated total cost, based on the prices you’ve set for parts. You can set multiple prices per part, using our new vendor-price contract functionality. And now your requisitions tie seamlessly into your inventory. When you mark a requisition as ‘Received on Asset’, you can decide if you want the requisition to update your inventory quantities.
Automatically number more things in Helm CONNECT
In 2017, we introduced automatic numbering on tasks, requisitions and corrective actions. Ever since, we’ve heard requests to expand the auto-numbering functionality in Helm CONNECT. So we did!
With version 1.8, you can auto-number your inspections, maintenance routines, inventory counts, and forms. Number rules control how these numbers look and behave. Our number rules engine is very flexible so you can configure a different number rule for each item, or share rules across items. To keep things simple, we’ve organized all of the number rules in one place, in Operations on the Setup menu.
Want to get a better understanding of how our auto-numbers work? Please click here for more information.
Meet our Message Center!
We’re streamlining how we tell our users about releases and updates. In version 1.8, we’re proud to release the Helm CONNECT Message Center! Find the Message Center in the top right-hand corner – look for the megaphone icon, next to the Help icon. This is where you’ll find notices from us about upcoming updates and releases, and links to the release notes.
Improved data transfer
Last but not least, we’ve made big improvements to our data transfer process. This feature works behind the scenes so you may not notice the difference. But it’s there! Before, data was sent in one big chunk. Now, we’ve switched to a streaming style of data transfer. This means that new work – such as tasks, inspections, maintenance routines, forms and jobs – will be received more reliably by assets, even when crews are working in areas with poor or intermittent Internet connections.
And that’s not all! You can find a full list of the features for version 1.8 in the release notes.
Our roll-out of version 1.8 starts in April. Your account manager will be in touch about your deployment date. To see what’s happening in Helm CONNECT 1.9, continue reading this post.
Happy Helm-ing!
