Reports, search and export

Reports sent automatically by e-mail

In many plants, reporting looks like this: every month someone produces the same summary and e-mails it round. They spend half a day copying data into a spreadsheet, and then half a day answering questions about why the figures differ from last month’s.

An automatic report in TraxSystem is defined once: data scope, format, time and list of recipients. After that it arrives by itself, with PDF and XLSX attachments, and nobody has to prepare it.

Sending messages with attachments takes a dozen or so seconds per message. With ten recipients that makes no difference; with two hundred it does, so the sending time for a large batch is chosen when the report is configured.

Ready-made breakdowns: entry statistics, individual events, presence

Entry statistics show the traffic over a period, broken down by entry type, carrier and gate. They most often end up in the management briefing, because they show how busy the site is without anyone having to explain the system.

The event report for a single person is what you reach for in disputed cases: when they came in, when they left, through which passage, and whether the card read was accepted.

On top of that there are breakdowns of presence, weighing, patrols, random inspections and rail traffic, each with export and the option of automatic sending.

The cross-cutting search looks through all the data at once. Typing in a registration number or a surname finds everything connected with it: entries, passages, documents, weighings, incidents.

Visibility scope applies to exports too

Permissions say what a user can do. Visibility scope says which data they see, and it has two dimensions: target sites and entry types. The rule is fail-closed, so a user without an assigned role sees no data at all.

In TraxSystem, visibility scope also applies in reports and exports. A file downloaded to Excel contains exactly what the user sees on screen, so an export cannot be used to reach data they should not be looking at. In logistics parks and on sites run by outside companies, that is a prerequisite.

Export headers are translated along with the interface, so a file going to a head office abroad does not need its columns retyped.

What reports will not do

TraxSystem reports are not an analytics tool or a data warehouse. They provide ready-made breakdowns and export, but they do not build arbitrary queries or analytical cubes. If your company runs an analytics tool, the right route is to feed the data into it.

Nor do they calculate financial indicators: the system does not know prices, rates or costs, so it cannot work out the cost of downtime or the value of a load. And they do not get round the visibility scope that comes with the role, in exports included.

Data is not kept indefinitely, because older records are subject to retention rules set by the data controller. How retention works is described on the data security page.

Questions about reports and export

Related

Vehicle entry controlTime and attendanceData securityIntegrations

Further reading: Permissions vs visibility scope · How many people are on site?

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