With our apologies to those of you still experiencing winter weather, Spring has finally arrived here on Vancouver Island! Although 2020 seemed like the year that would never end, it inspired some incredible changes for us here at Helm—including a new development approach that prioritizes customer feedback and some significant upgrades to our back-end database architecture and hosting—and we’re feeling really excited about our first release of 2021: Helm CONNECT 1.21.
Full version of the Work Rest module now available
Work Rest is a set of tools to help you manage your crew’s fatigue, and is the first of four major improvements that we’re rolling out to Helm CONNECT Personnel. In our previous release, we introduced a shore-only version of Work Rest and now we’re making the full version of this module available, including a new Work Rest tab under Onboard > Personnel for your crew to review and enter their work rest information, as well as data transfer between your assets and the shore. Check out this blog post for more about this exciting new module.
Inspired by your feedback
With a new development approach in 2021 that prioritizes customer feedback, we’re happy to introduce the following features, all of which were suggested by you, our customers:
Decline and reopen corrective actions
Compliance customers now have the ability to decline and reopen a corrective action. Clear visual cues in the interface as well as new email notifications will help to ensure that the assignees and the person who finished the item are aware that it has been declined and reopened.
Control how users are allowed to update tasks and corrective actions
To give Maintenance and Compliance customers greater control over how how tasks and corrective actions can be updated, we added two new permissions each on the Setup > Users > Roles tab under Maintenance > Settings and under Compliance > Corrective Actions > Settings.
Adjust trip times on multiple trips at once
When a delay or a change impacts several trips, Jobs customers can now use the new Adjust Trip Times window to update the times on all of those trips at once instead of having to update each one individually.
Convert currency on the Overview tab
Jobs customers who work with multiple currencies can now use a filter on the Jobs > Billing > Overview tab to quickly convert the amounts on their trips into another currency. The converted amounts will be displayed in a new Converted Amount column.
Faster installation and data transfer speeds
Continuing our commitment to improve the reliability, speed, and performance of Helm CONNECT in 2021, this release includes significant improvements to the speed at which you can install Helm CONNECT and transfer data between your assets and the shore. Helm CONNECT will now determine the optimal rate at which to transfer data and files, based on the speed of your internet connection and the amount of data waiting to transfer. You’ll notice this improvement particularly when there are large amounts of data to send, as there can be during asset installations or with assets that aren’t in regular communication with shore.
Note: There are two key factors that impact data transfer between your assets and the shore: network bandwidth and the processing power of your asset computers. Customers who meet or exceed our recommended technical specifications for asset installations will be better able to take advantage of these speed improvements.
Farewell to IE 11
As we’ve been reminding everyone for months, this is the release when we finally stop supporting Internet Explorer 11 (IE 11) and begin supporting Microsoft Edge. Our officially supported browsers are now the latest released versions of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. For more details about our deprecation of IE 11, check out this article.
That’s it for now. Be sure to check out our release notes for more details about Version 1.21 and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date on the latest Helm news. Your account manager would also be happy to answer your questions about anything in this release or to set up a demo for you.
Stay safe everyone and happy Helm-ing!
P.S. To see how Spring is unfolding here in Victoria, check out the results of our annual flower count!
