Spring is here in Victoria and we have a great new release to share with you (Helm CONNECT 1.14), including new Helm CONNECT features and improvements across all four product lines. We’re also excited to share a special feature that we started working on at Helm Conference 2018 and presented to everyone at the farewell BBQ. You saw it come to life and now you get to use it! If you missed what happened in our last release, you can read about it here.
Link documents right where you need them
You used to have to go to the Documents Library to see the documents related to your tasks, checklists, corrective actions, or forms, such as technical manuals, diagrams, procedures, and policies. Now you can link those documents directly to inspection, maintenance, or form templates, or directly to specific tasks or corrective actions. This puts the right documents into your team’s hands, where and when they need them. To learn more about this feature, check out this article.
Track who’s acknowledging your documents
How do you know who’s acknowledging all those documents you publish out to your assets? Previously, your crews could only acknowledge documents on behalf of an asset, which meant you never knew exactly who had read them. Now in Helm CONNECT 1.14 you can decide if you want each document acknowledged on behalf of your assets or by the individuals onboard those assets. This means you can now track exactly who’s acknowledged each document and, when you update a document, you can decide if your crew needs to acknowledge the new version or not.
If you were at Helm Conference 2018, you saw this feature in action at our Helm Labs event! During the conference, our developers ran a 48-hour development marathon to focus on ideas suggested by you, our Helm CONNECT users. During their final presentation, everyone voted for the ideas that should make it into Helm CONNECT. This was such a popular feature, we said we’d put it in our next release, and here it is!
See asset activities at a glance
We want you to be even more connected to your assets, so we added a new icon to the asset cards on the Maintenance > Overview tab that shows when your assets are engaged in an activity. We also added a new filter to help you track any assets performing a specific type of activity, such as dry dock or waiting. Each time your captains log an activity in Onboard > Logs, the information will automatically be available on the Maintenance > Overview tab.
Set contracts at the trip level
What happens if you need to bill an agent for the inbound and outbound trips on an order, but bill any shifts in between to the ship owner? Previously, you had to track those shifts as separate orders, creating extra work for your billing clerks and resulting in additional vessel calls in your reports. Now you can now set your contracts at the trip level, giving you the flexibility to bill individual trips in the same order to different customers when you need to. To learn more about this feature, check out this article.
Improved speed and performance for reports
We’re making our reports for forms, checklists, tasks, and corrective actions even faster and more reliable. In this release, you’ll see we made the filters at the top of these reports more consistent and added some helpful new fields. We also changed the names and locations for some of the existing fields to make the reports more intuitive, and added divisional filtering so your users see only the data that’s relevant to them.
Remember, if you have any of these reports linked to an external business intelligence tool, like Power BI, you’ll need to update the names of the fields you’re pulling from Helm CONNECT. Check out this article and this article to learn more about these report changes in Helm CONNECT 1.14.
All date formats now match browser language settings
And finally, the dates in all our product lines now match the format used by the display language you set in your browser. Check out this article to learn more.
That’s it for our second release of 2019! Be sure to check out our release notes for all the details. Remember, your feedback helps us build the features you need, so keep it coming! And don’t forget to mark your calendars…Helm Conference 2019 is coming to Nashville! We’ll roll out more details and registration information soon, so bookmark our conference site and save the date for October 7 to 9!
To learn more about what’s happening in Helm CONNECT 1.15, check out this post.
Happy Helm-ing!
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