Feature presentation: Individual project status and notifications

Onboarding projects are usually not just about checking test messages. Project management and communication with partners also require some attention. This is especially true when many partners need to be connected or partners only perform their project tasks when asked to do so several times.

It therefore made sense to automate these two aspects of onboarding projects as well. To this end, we have created the option for administrators to track the individual project status of partners. This is displayed when you, as an administrator, click on the 'Manage users for this project' button. Here you can see the current status of all project partners. If you click on the 'Show detailed user status' button in the 'Details' column for the desired user, the open and completed project steps are displayed.

With manually maintained lists, there is always a risk that a status update for individual partners will be forgotten or entered incorrectly. To avoid this, the status is automatically maintained in Cargogear for each partner. For a project with a questionnaire, for example, the status 'Questionnaire in editing' is initially displayed. Once the partner has completed this, it is updated to 'Questionnaire in approvement'. An administrator can therefore see in the list of project partners where he can check a completed questionnaire.

This is also where our second feature comes into play, the notifications. An administrator can set whether reminders should be sent for new and existing projects. If the feature has been activated, they can specify the intervals at which new emails should be sent. If this interval is seven days, for example, a new email with a reminder is sent every seven days after the start of an onboarding step. The administrator can also set how many reminders are sent per process.

If the partner had not completed the questionnaire before the end of the first interval, a first reminder email on the topic would have been sent automatically. This saves the onboarding team the work of having to generate and send such notifications themselves. In addition to the overview in the project administration, the administrator also receives an email when the partner has completed the questionnaire. This means that the administrator does not have to constantly check the status and can devote the time saved to other tasks.

We also use this combination of a status display and reminder and notification emails for the other steps in an onboarding project: partners are informed when new validation interfaces are assigned to them. Administrators can see which interfaces have already been successfully validated and receive a notification when the partner has mastered all interfaces.

EDI providers and onboarding teams in particular often have a responsibility to prove their activities to their customers. This is especially true in cases where partners do not cooperate or only cooperate after repeated requests. With this in mind, we also show how many reminder messages have already been sent and on which day the next message will be sent. This aimes at demonstrating that the lack of project progress is at least not due to a lack of communication on the part of the EDI provider or onboarding team.