This document describes all the functional components of RedSky which are accessible by Menus. There are a limited set of chron- jobs and maintenance batch processes that are excluded from this document.
It should be noted that RedSky has role-based security and allows easy configuration for menus, tabs, and certain field-level access controls to be implemented.
Quick Glossary
Before we discuss the menu functionality, here’s a quick glossary. RedSky follows a transaction hierarchy and accommodates moving, storage, logistics, relocations services, etc.
Corporate Account: A company or Corporation giving business to the Moving Company, this will cover various policies, billing procedures, etc.
Customer File (CF): Basic Information about the transferee.
Service Order (SO): Each service is performed for a customer, could be multiple services, e.g. Air, Truck, storage, relocation, etc.
Billing, Accounting, Forwarding, and Domestic: These screens are related to each Service Order.
Work Ticket: Manage Operational activities.
Claims: Handle Claim processing.
To support this hierarchy, we provide menus to access each of these levels directly.
Move Management
Move Management menus are the core menus used by all Internal Users for managing Mobility transactions. These functions are mostly used by Move Managers, Forwarding Persons, Sales, Pricing, warehouses, etc.
Customer File (CF): All transactions will always originate at a customer file record which contains detailed information related to the customer name, service type, origin address, destination address, and billing information.
Service Order (SO): Contain details for each service being performed for the customer, there can be 1 to many Service Orders per customer file record. The Service Order inherits the information from the Customer File. The Service Order is the workhorse of the RedSky and is further divided into various tabs as follows:
S/O Detail: Contains the order details like mode of transportation, service type, weights & volume information of the goods to be moved or stored.
Billing: Once a service order is created against a customer file, the billing process comes into existence. The Billing module of the application allows you to manage all billing details related to a move or storage, such as contract, valuation/insurance, and authorizations, etc. The credit tab comes under the Billing section.
The Credit Card tab is to update the customer's credit card and billing details.
Accounting: This is one of the most comprehensive functionalities that allows users to manage the full accounting with respect to a service order. The user can manage entitlement, estimates, revisions, actual expenses, and receivables associated with the SO. This information also helps you to keep track of gross margins for the SO. The most important functions supported in this module are vendor payable management and invoicing.
The module provides various action buttons as follows:
Add: To add a new accounting line to open a detailed page covering the following sections:
Generate Invoice: To generate invoices for the service order for all accounting lines that are ready for invoicing and post them simultaneously.
Add Default Template: To add a default accounting template which can automatically enter multiple account lines based on Contract, Routing, Job type, Bill-to-code, Mode, etc.
Apply Posting Date: To post payables lines which have been approved.
Reverse Invoices: Reverse lines which have been posted to be reversed.
Forwarding: To manage various details related to the move, such as container information, piece and carton details, Vehicle Details, Transport Routing.
Domestic: Contains information for primarily local job types and Van line moves such as driver, truck, hauling agent information.
Work Tickets: Manage local operations related to the company’s warehouses, trucks, the crew need to be managed for the SO, e.g. packing, unpacking, warehouse work etc. This module also allows assigning equipment, crew, and trucks associated with the SO.
Claims: Manage claims regarding any loss or damages that occurred during the move. The module allows itemizing damaged or missing items, assigning work tickets (indirectly crew who worked on the ticket) where damage may have occurred, and settlement process.
Military Bases: Allows searching SCAC codes against qualified agents who have LOI for the base.
Partner: View existing partner’s details. Partners are any entity which has a relationship with the Service Order. RedSky groups partners as private party, accounts, agents, vendors, carriers, or owner-operators.
Private Party: Displays address information for private parties
Accounts: Displays address information, account information, and customer ratings. An Account is a company where who gives the agent business.
Agents: Displays address information, agent profile, etc.
Vendors: Displays address and vendor information for vendors. The vendor is a broad term and applies to any category of a partner who does not fall into any other partner grouping.
Carriers: Displays address information and carrier details for carriers
Owner Operators: Displays address information and owner information for truck drivers
Forwarding: Manage forwarding and packaging details related to the move, such as container information, piece counts, Vehicle Details, Transport Routing. This module is further divided into various sections:
SS Container: manage quantity, weight, and volume, etc. of the Steam Ship containers used.
Piece Count: manage details of the cartons and air-container used.
Vehicle: manage details of the customer vehicles assigned or transported.
Routing: manage transportation routing detail include a carrier, Bill of Loading #, ETD, ATD, ETA, ATA, etc.
Consignee Instructions: Manage consignee information such as Shipper, Notify, and Consignee, to be used to prepare instructions to forwarders.
Agent Quotes: To handle requests for quotes from overseas agents. These are normally competitive rate requests and once the shipment is confirmed, the information is moved to the normal customer file information.
Pricing Wizard: A very powerful interactive tool to price international shipments. The user enters basic shipment information such as origin, destination, estimated wts/volume, packaging, etc. and the system provides pricing, origin, destination, and freight options available for moving a shipment from the origin to destination address provided. The Wizard relies heavily on Google Maps for visually displaying routing information.
Local Operations
Local Operations menus support activities related to the warehouse, Storage, and crew activities including timesheet, overtime, planning of tickets.
Operations Management: A company can set up operational hubs with affiliated warehouses to manage operations. This menu provides options to manage the daily operational limit of tickets that can be handled by an operational hub, there are 2 parameters to manage -- the # of tickets that the hub can handle and the minimum service days that ticket can be handled.
Time Sheet: To manage timesheets for all crews including leave records and assignments to work tickets. Used mainly by warehouse managers.
Overtime Processing: to process weekly timesheet for OT processing for payroll.
Trace Storage: Search the details for a particular storage location on the basis of SO number, Location, Ticket No, First Name, Last Name, tag, description.
Trucking Ops: Manage trucks and trailers available for hauling operation including managing safety parameters.
Location Library: Manage the master list of locations for each warehouse for different types of storage, e.g. pallets, containers, sofa, rugs, vaults, etc.
Work Planning: Warehouse manager can use this to plan operational activity for upcoming weeks.
Integration Log: provide details for daily XML upload between Van Lines and Document Scanning interfaces.
Finance
Finance: to manage all the financial activities related to RedSky including interfaces to Accounting packages and other integration.
Partner Data extract: to extract partner data to interface with Accounting Package (Solomon).
Invoice Data Extract: to extract invoices generated by billing people from the Accounting module into Solomon. This is extracted by each company division.
Solomon Payment Update to import data from Solomon for which payments have been received into RedSky
GST Storage Extract: Manage the submissions of Storage Invoicing information for Department of State account work.
Standard Deductions: to process standard deductions for van Line Driver settlements.
Payable Data Extract: To post all the vendor bills processed in Accounting Module received from vendors to Solomon. This is extracted by each company division
Sub Contractor Pay Extract: Extract the details of subcontractor pay as per company division; this menu option can be used.
Find Our Invoice: Search for a transaction by invoice #
Find Vendor Invoice: Search vendor invoice in RedSky.
Domestic Sales Commission: is to calculate the commission to be paid to sales persons for competitive work.
Find Client Authorizations: Search for SO based on account authorization numbers.
Storage Billing: to preview and create account lines for permanent storage transactions.
World Bank Invoice: to extract invoices for client World Bank for upload to their corporate system.
Van Line Settlement: To allow weekly reconciliation of Van Line Statements submitted via XML.
Sub Contractor Charges: To handle ad-hoc payments and advances made to owner operators for driver settlement.
Storage Extract for Credit Card: to extract invoice information for charging to customer’s credit cards for permanent storage jobs.
Payroll
The Payroll module of the application is to define payroll
Lock Payroll: Lock timesheets for processing payroll.
Crew Payroll Setup: To manage all the crew details including salary, title, leave balances, etc. This information is used in timesheet and payroll processing.
The following menus are very customized for SSCW implementation and reflect the rules for paying crew embedded in a Union Contract and are most probably not easy to transfer to other companies.
Category Revenue: Maintain crew revenue allocation by crew #, crew type, and type of work. This information has been used this information for calculating revenue share by crew members working on a ticket where payments are made based on load packed or unpacked.
Sharing calculation: Maintain calculations (formula) used for calculating revenue share for work tickets based on different conditions.
Payroll Allocation: Allocate default calculations to revenue share calculation based on company division, job type, and ticket type.
Health and Welfare Extract: Extract health and welfare data for submission to Crew Union.
Payroll ADP Extract: Extract weekly crew payroll to interface with ADP payroll system.
Payroll Internal Extract: Extract weekly crew payroll for internal analysis, similar to ADP extract but with additional information.
The Leave Calculator: Compute leave balances per company rules.
Pricing Mgmt
Pricing Mgmt module is to manages the base information and data that is used by the Pricing Wizard module.
Partner Rate Matrix: Displays Agent's tariff for origin or destination services by different modes, packing types, and commodities. The Tariff is used in the Pricing Wizard module to calculate origin and destination charges. The Agents enter their own tariff from the Agent Portal and this menu provides us with a capability to validate the agent tariffs.
Additional Charges: It to manage additional charges levied on US origin and Destination work such as Custom Fees, THC, etc.
Mark Up: Manage profits for origin and destination work to be included in the Pricing Wizard quotes.
Freight Mark Up: To manage profits to be levied on freight calculations in Pricing Wizard.
Hauling Grid: Manage hauling charges for US countries to be used in Pricing Wizard.
Management Information
Management Information: This allows users to run data extracts and run forms and reports to provide decision and analytical support to users. The extract functionality of the system is very powerful as it extracts data to Excel directly and supports managers familiar with Excel functions such as filters, pivots, grouping, etc. This is very powerful.
Reports: To run formatted reports to be used by different users and functions. We provide reports for operational, financial, sales, payroll, etc. And many have selection parameters and can be designed for outputting into CSV, XLS, HTML or PDF
Forms: Are similar to reports except they are heavily formatted and are normally assigned for a specific SO#, work ticket #, claims #, etc. Some examples are invoices, Instructions to Forwarders, Work Tickets, etc; forms are normally formatted for PDF or Word.
Data Extract: Provides ad-hoc query and data extraction. Users can select from different search parameters including dates and also selected different output fields for output into Excel. This function tremendously reduces the need for designing multiple reports and gives the users flexibility to query data directly. In addition, users can save their queries and optionally schedule them for back-end execution and the output will be emailed to the user as an Excel attachment.
Work Ticket Extract: to extract work ticket data for analysis into Excel.
OMNI Report Extract: to submit tonnage to OMNI.
Storage Extract: To extract to storage information into Excel.
Storage Location Extract: to extract a list of Storage locations including occupied information.
Claims Extract: to extract Claim and loss data for analysis into Excel.
SQL Extract: System Admin can create canned queries which are available in this menu for execution by limited users. These queries are either complex or are required by a limited set of users so no special Extract is designed. The queries are output into Excel and can also be emailed on a daily basis.
Reciprocity Analysis: very important report for getting a real-time view of different bookings and tonnage exchanged between RedSky User Company and agents.
Administration
The administration menus allow the System Administrator to configure various control and setup values for RedSky. These include setting up global details of the application, such as partner details, contracts and current users, which are used while processing and completing the move management tasks. Various crucial functions like Define to Do Rules, Role Access, and Menu Permission are also performed through this module.
Ref Job Type: manage the default roles to be associated with job type and company division. These defaults are assigned to CF and SO when they are created and the To-Do Rules leverage these for marking activities by user roles for CF or SO.
Partner: to manage RedSky partner's information. This function is very important because managing accounts, agents, vendors, carriers, etc. is the key to connecting various participants in a transaction. Some details for partners were provided in Move Management --> Partners, but this Admin menu provides capabilities to approve or inactivate partners, set up accounting interface codes, etc.
Partner Merging Wizard: Allows duplicate partner codes to be merge including changing the merged records at different transactions too.
Contract: To manage different Accounting Contracts under which SOs are setup. Each contract can have multiple charge codes with Accounting GL codes tied up to allow accounting lines to be interfaced with financial systems. The system also allows computational formulas and rate grids to be setup for billing support in Accounting.
Reference: Many dropdowns are parameterized and this function allows those to be edited. Examples of parameters are Commodities, ticket services, routing, etc.
Ports: to manage seaports used in Forwarder--> Routing and Pricing Wizard.
Standard Addresses: Used to store warehouse addresses or other commonly used addresses by Job Types.
Company Events: To add company holidays, used by timesheet and Survey Calendar.
Accounting Templates: To manage default account lines creation templates by job type, mode, routing, accounting code, etc.
Sea Freight Update: to manages sea freight rates to be used by Pricing Wizard.
Ref Zip Geo Code: to manage the geographical coordinates, postal codes for different cities, states, and country locations. Currently, we’ve populated this from a commercial data bases and there is no need to use this functionality.
Client Payment Upload: To mark accounting lines updated when certain corporate accounts confirm payments for invoices submitted. There is a standard CSV format file that is used for input.
Material & Equipment: to manage material and equipment for the work tickets.
Document Processing: To manage documents that have been processed via the scan stations into the central server but have not been properly OCRed against a SO or are duplicates.
External Log File to view the access by external users indicates log-in time and IP address.
Ref crate: to manage the details for cartons like length, height, volume etc. This feature of the application allows adding new cartons to the carton database.
Customer Portal Resource Management: to manage standard forms/documents to be displayed to customers in the Customer Portal’s resource repository. The documents can be categorized by Account code, country of import, or export.
Exchange Rates: to manage currency exchange rates.
IMF Extracts: Extract transaction and accounting information for interfacing with IMF Account system.
To-Do Rules: the system provides the capability to enforced different business rules on a scheduled basis (currently twice a day). The rules are based on SQL syntax and can work off any vital information missing based on a certain control date. The rule output can be assigned to any of the following roles, sales, warehouse manager, coordinator, billing, payable, auditor, etc. The rule output is displayed in the Activity Management icon on top of the screen.
Reports: to register new reports and forms that have been uploaded to the server. Each report can be limited to different output formats and can be restricted by user roles.
Security
The Security application is to ensure the privacy and security of data, menu access permissions for a specific role, and also allows defining system configuration and data security filters, etc.
The Current User is to view user details.
The Menu Permission: set menu access permissions for a specific role with different levels of access granted (No Access, Edit or View permission) to the role for each menu individually.
The View User: to maintain system user’s detail.
The System Default: to manage company-specific default values, e.g. accounting posting periods, control fields, etc.
The Audit Setup: to configure fields that need to be audited – the history of changes needs to be maintained.
The System Configuration: to update the configuration setting of different tables/fields in the system.
The Tab Permission: to manage access permission; whether a specific tab or component will be available to a specific role.
The Role Permission: to manage role-based access permission for a tab/component; whether a specific tab or component will be available to a specific role.
The Company Division: to manage company divisions for a setup – company divisions relate to different accounting companies a client has and needs to interface with.
The Data Security Filter: to manage row-level security for external users, e.g. Account and Agent Portal users.
The Data Security Set: to group Data security filters, the external users are assigned Data Security Sets to enable row-level security.
The Document Control: to define default settings for document access by customer portal, account portal or partner portal users.
Action Bar
The Action Bar provided in RedSky is a set of functions to access functionality that cuts across transactions.
Activity Management: This is a very powerful workflow tool used to track daily business activities using the business to-do rules. This tool shows up the notes for Follow-Up, and the activity assigned to the particular user selected. Activities are assigned to the users using the TO-DO RULES explained above.
File Cabinet: This function provides electronic documentation for the documents associated with a Service Order / Customer File, e.g. Invoices, inventories, Estimate Memo, etc.
Notes: Using this function we can see all the notes entered in the system for the selected Customer file / Service Order. This allows you to add a new follow-up and a new note by specifying the note type.
Surveys: This function helps the Sales People to check their survey schedule for the given date range. This provides all the address details, time of the survey, and all other related data. Using this tool, users can also access customer file which needs to be surveyed and also provides the Google map to check the address location.
Operations: Display the warehouse scheduled for two weeks prior and also two weeks ahead to plan accordingly.
My Account: Using this function, user can view their own profile. This shows the user's access rights, password expiry. User can update their personal information and also configure default menus, search parameters, themes, etc.
Clipboard: This behaves like a scratchpad for users to fill in any information for future reference.
Updates: This is a way of communicating to the user's new enhancements made in RedSky.
Help: This is an online Help function for RedSky with search functionality.