Cargogear upgrades in May and June: New features for your EDI projects

In May and June, we were able to finalize features in various areas of our Cargogear platform. Here we show you the most important innovations.

You can already design your Cargogear instance with your company logo, your color scheme and your own subdomain under which it can be accessed. Our aim is to ensure that our software matches your corporate design as well as possible. We are now also applying this concept to the screen that users see when they log in to the Cargogear platform. A big thank you for this goes to our colleagues at ActiDoo. They have not only supported us very competently with this topic, but also in the area of Identity & Access Management in general. Here you can see the login screen for one of our own instances:

In many cases, large EDI projects are linked to important goals for the IT department or even the entire company: Consolidation of or the switch to a new EDI system, for example, or the opening of a new production site. Transparency about the progress of the project is therefore essential in order to identify bottlenecks or deteriorating trends at an early stage. For EDI service providers, payment and performance evaluation are often based on project statistics too.

Project reporting is therefore important, but it can be a tedious task: Excel spreadsheets often have to be maintained and the content prepared graphically. With several contributors, you have to worry about content being accidentally overwritten. The result: working copies are created, which are then called 'Reporting_Project_X_Jon_Doe_new_new'. Maintaining an overview here can be challenging. We want to save you this effort and have therefore integrated a reporting feature for your projects into Cargogear.

It not only shows the project progress for the last few months. In the case of long-term projects, it also summarizes the connections created further back per quarter. If you frequently carry out large EDI projects, you will also be interested in the average time it takes to complete a partner connection and the average affiliation of a partner to a project phase.

When planning new projects, you can use the first indicator to estimate how long similar projects are likely to take. You can use the second indicator to identify bottlenecks in the project: For example, does it take a particularly long time to complete the questionnaires? Then you could consider how you can optimize them. If, on the other hand, the confirmation of the questionnaires by an administrator takes a long time, you could investigate internally what is delaying the completion of this phase.

You can use questionnaires in your onboarding project to request information from your partners in a structured manner. This could be, for example, the parameters of EDI connections or contact details of your partners. In most cases, however, you will also need this information outside the Cargogear platform. We support this with a new download function. It provides you with the questionnaire as a JSON file. We have chosen this format because it can be processed directly by many applications. And if you cannot process it directly, it can also be easily converted into a PDF or XML document.

Not only can you archive the questionnaire responses at the end of a project, but you can also further automate your onboarding processes. For example, if your EDI system allows the import of configuration files, you could map the parameters of the EDI connection into the format of these configuration files and then import them. This saves you time and typing errors, which are always a risk with manual configurations.