The Trucking Nerd

As I mentioned in a previous post, we have standardized on SQL Reporting Services for our reporting needs.  Coming from a Business Intelligence consulting background I had used a handful of powerful reporting solutions such as BusinessObjects, Spotfire, etc, so I was very leery when I first started experimenting with SQL Reporting Services.

After working with it for over two years, I can safely say that it is a very decent (and free) reporting solution for people running SQL Server.  For small to medium businesses who already own SQL, odds are with a little bit of experimentation, you can make reporting services work for you.

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Popularity: 96% [?]

I made a frustrating discovery a few weeks ago that I’m still dumbfounded by and keep hoping someone will surprise me with an answer, but so far my forum postings have yielded no fruit. 

We have standardized on the increasingly popular Microsoft SQL Reporting Services as our standard report writing architecture at the office.  It is great because it is very similar to Crystal and offers a bunch of features such as a web service API, supports report subscriptions and tons of other useful elements. 

The discovery I made however is that while the graphing components are a stripped down version of the Dundas controls, the ability to plot a simple trendline on a line chart or scatter plot is non-existent.  We have gotten so used to looking at trend lines and Excel has made it so easy to do this, just a couple clicks and you can quickly see how things are trending using a variety of regression formulas.  We use SQL Reporting Services 2005, and apparently, adding a trend line means you have to do it the hard way.  Y=MX+B, how hard could it be?…let me tell you, it isn’t something they teach you in SQL 101.  If anyone else out there has found a relatively painless way of doing this, please share!

Popularity: 38% [?]

This article is the second in a series discussing our document imaging workflow system.  This article discusses the batch workflow processing.  The TOLIA Batch Entry imaging module adds a method of mass upload of images to the TOLIA document imaging system built on top of TMWSuite.  Even with the image upload capability of the TOLIA Image Viewer, there are times that we need to mass upload images in a batch process.

This need arises several times a week actually since we rely on the TripPak overnight service that allows our drivers to send in all of their signed bills of lading, toll and fuel receipts, etc.  It would be too cumbersome to try to individually scan and upload these images, so an efficient batch processing tool was developed, aka the TOLIA Batch Entry application.

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Popularity: 44% [?]

The TOLIA Image Viewer is a custom document imaging add on module for TMW Suite.  It was the first component that was built as part of the TOLIA solution and applications. 

This application not only serves as the tool that images are viewed with, but it also has many of other features that were added to streamline our document imaging process.  It has vastly improved our process workflow for how all documents related to a trip are pushed through the system.

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Popularity: 29% [?]

As I mentioned in my previous post, at Tradewinds we had developed a very simple and easy to use imaging system that we have integrated into TMWSuite to provide one click document retrieval.  Prior to my arrival at Tradewinds, we had originally been scanning bills and confirmations and had been labeling them in folders and using file names.  This was slow since it was a batch process, it was cumbersome since it relied on manual labeling and it made it hard to find images…naturally the business had progressed and a system was needed.

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Popularity: 30% [?]