I’m happy to introduce our second release of the year: Helm CONNECT 1.22! With a new development approach in 2021 that prioritizes customer feedback, our latest release is full of features and improvements that were inspired by and suggested by you, our customers. Let’s take a closer look.
Introducing Logbook
Our Logbook module is here! This much-anticipated new module—which integrates maintenance, compliance, and personnel into operations, and greatly expands how Helm CONNECT is used onboard—paves the way for our barge maintenance and barge dispatch modules down the road. Check out this blog post for all the details about Logbook.
Improvements to the Work Rest module
As we shared previously, we’re building the Work Rest module with the help of regular validation sessions with our market. By working with this group of interested customers and prospects, we’re ensuring that our work-rest tools meet the needs of the marine industry. Those validation sessions led to so many great improvements in this release that we dedicated a whole series of blog posts to them:
- Making Work Rest Tracking Easier Than Ever
- STCW Compliance in Just 3 Clicks!
- Helm CONNECT Work Rest Update: Crew Sign Off and Legal Footers
- Customizing Your Work Rest Tracking
- How to Prevent Pencil Whipping in Work Rest Tracking
Dashboard updates
Our Maintenance and Compliance (MC) and Jobs Dashboards combine data sources across Helm CONNECT into Power BI dashboards to help you visualize and filter your data. Please reach out to your account manager if you’re interested in learning more about our dashboards or would like to book a demo. In the meantime, let’s look at the changes we made to the dashboards in this release.
MC Dashboard
We made several improvements to the MC Dashboard, starting with the new My Fleet page, now the first page you see when you open the dashboard. It provides your most important KPIs at a glance and allows you to quickly drill down to the other pages in the dashboard for more details.
We also added three other new pages to the dashboard:
- Engineering – Fleet Overview: Tracks the hours-based performance of the components for all the assets in your fleet.
- Readings: Looks at the readings for all the assets in your fleet, including reading trends over time and any out-of-spec readings.
- Passenger Vessels: Summarizes your ridership information, including how many people are riding each route, which routes are the busiest, and which times of day see the highest passenger counts.
To make it easier to see the status of your drills and certifications, we combined the Drill Matrix – Assets and Drill Matrix – Crew pages into a single page called Drill Matrix and combined the Certifications – Assets and Certifications – Crew pages into a single page called Certifications. These new pages allow you to toggle easily between asset and crew information. We also made some nice visual changes to the MC Dashboard, such as square edges and dropped shadows on the slicers.
Jobs Dashboard
Meet the Jobs Dashboard! Our newest dashboard is already generating enthusiastic feedback from customers. They’re raving about the visibility it brings to their dispatch operations and the way it helps them view data across multiple ports or regions and improve asset utilization. In this release, we added a new page to the dashboard called Port Calls that tracks ships coming into port, provides metrics about top customers within the last 30 days, and helps to reduce overhead by optimizing the location of assets within the port. We also added a new Revenue Breakdown page to break revenue down by the port, trip type, and asset, and by the different fees on the order form, such as the base rate or fuel. And finally, we renamed the Operations page to Jobs.
Changes to the reporting tools
We made several changes to our reporting tools in this release to give you the flexibility to build the reports you need while maintaining and improving the performance of Helm CONNECT. First, some great news for anyone who needs to report on more than a year’s worth of data at a time: we removed the 366-day limit on the date range filters—you can now select any dates you want for your reports! You’ll also notice that we added new limits to the number of columns and rows you can add to each report and changed the behavior for the report previews. Check out this article for all the details about these reporting changes.
That’s it for now. Be sure to check out our release notes for more details about Version 1.22 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!
