The Trucking Nerd

I had the pleasure of chatting with Trevor Dunsford, a software developer from Canadian based Bison Transport last week.  The topic of our discussion was a software application they had written to extend TMW Systems TMWSuite application to allow advanced appointment scheduling.

TMW’s Order Entry application leaves a little to be desired when it comes to the ability to optimize the appointment scheduling process.  The scheduling abilities in Order Entry are confusing and not intuitive.  It also doesn’t take into account any sort of ability to administer appointment workflow when multiple people are responsible for setting appointments.  Bison realized this gap and took matters into their own hands by developing a slick add on application they call the Appointment Queue (AQ) .  Trevor has written a nice blog entry detailing the application.

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Popularity: 42% [?]

When it first dawned on me that the deadline for analog cell service was coming to a closure in 2008, I didn’t think much about it.  After all, it is reported that only 1% of the cell phone population use a cell phone that is analog only, so what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that there are millions of devices around the US that rely solely on analog, and many of them are not phones, they are devices like OnStar, GPS tracking systems, alarm system devices, etc.  When the analog service is shutoff, these devices will be rendered useless.  This could happen as early as February 18th, 2008 since this is the date the FCC says it is ok for cell companies to shutoff analog services.

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Popularity: 46% [?]

This is the third article in the TOLIA Document Imaging for TMWSuite series.  To recap, in article 1 of this series I discussed the TOLIA Image Viewer which is used for quick document retrieval and viewing in addition to some upload capabilities.

In article 2 I discussed the TOLIA Batch Entry program used to upload and tag scanned images in a batch mode. 

In this article, we’ll focus on the last of the methods for inputting documents into the imaging system, which is with a tool called TOLIA QuickScan.

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Popularity: 27% [?]

I think of my children anytime I get some new piece of hardware or software…I can’t wait to get it out of the box and toy around with it.  The day I received my action pack subscription with my copy of Microsoft Vista Business Edition, I had to dive in head first.

I of course had been messing with the beta releases all along in a virtualized environment, but I thought now that it was live, I might as well make the jump and load it as my primary operating system.

I decided to take a Friday afternoon and eagerly make the jump.  I made an Acronis copy of my work machine (thank God I did this) and started down the path of doing the upgrade from Windows XP Pro to Vista.  Everything seemed to be going smoothly, then all of a sudden I got the blue screen of death. When it rebooted, things just continued to go south, it wouldn’t boot anymore and the installer wouldn’t continue, I was completely hosed.  After an hour of googling and trying different things, I gave up, since I had to be operational by Monday.  I ended up restoring my machine back to XP Pro.  I wasn’t about to let one bad install stop me from persevering though. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 20% [?]

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: 64% [?]

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: 23% [?]

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: 25% [?]

This week I attended the TMW Systems 2007 user conference down in Orlando, FL with some fellow colleagues from Tradewinds.  As usual, the event was jam packed with sessions and great opportunities to meet other users of the software.  This was the third TMW conference that I have personally attended and am most impressed with how well put together the conference is.

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Popularity: 22% [?]