Robin
Right, welcome everybody to the Alpha Tracker Tuesday tips and tricks webinar. We'll just wait for a few more people to join. They're joining, lots of people are joining now. Um, let's just say hello to a few people who we've got.
Robin
Hello, Amy. Hello, Edward. Gaye, Lynn, Paul, Peter, loads more. Thank you very much for joining us today. Um, it's the day after the bank holidays. You've done very well to remember the webinar today.
Robin
This is our seventh Alpha Tracker tips and tricks webinar already. Um, this month it's about troubleshooting. So what you can do if something doesn't work as expected, how you can help yourself and more importantly, perhaps how you can help us to help you.
Robin
Um, presenting the webinar this week, uh, this month rather it's me. I'm Robin. I'm the director here and we've got Dan joining us.
Dan
Hi, everyone. How you doing?
Robin
Dan's our development team leader and Dan's going to be keeping an eye on the Q&A chat window, the question answer chat window, so if you've got any questions at all please just pop them in there and Dan will interrupt us and we'll do our best to answer them.
Robin
If we can't answer them during the webinar then we'll answer them afterwards by email, Kim will be in touch. Right, I think we should just crack on, we've got 20 minutes, that's all, we aim for 20 minutes, 20 to 30 minutes to make sure it doesn't spoil your lunch break and let me just show you what we're covering off today.
Robin
So first of all if you can't access Alpha Tracker at all or you've got an error message what would you do? Are you waiting for an asbestos report perhaps? That's one of the most common calls we get into the help desk, what do you do in that situation?
Robin
Are you finding things slow? How to tell if it's your PC or whether it's the system or the internet, we'll cover that off today and then finally how to do things the most efficient way in Alpha Tracker.
Robin
So I've got a couple of tips for you to show you how to do things quickly and efficiently, maybe not the way you're used to doing them so it's worth watching that and then it's just how to get in touch if you do need our help.
Robin
Firstly then, what to do if Alpha Tracker is not working at all and I just wanted to to sort of give you a bit of background in this because these sorts of systems, any system that runs on the web, they're complicated, there's lots of pieces all joined up to give you the application that you're trying to access Alpha Tracker in this case.
Robin
So there's the Amazon cloud that powers Alpha Tracker, there's the internet from Amazon through to your office if you're working at the office, there's all of the connection equipment at your office, the router in the hub, there's the internal office network, there's your PC, there's a web browser, any of this can go wrong.
Robin
So sometimes if you can't get onto Alpha Tracker, you might just have to switch your computer off, switch it back on and see if it goes away or just refresh your browser. If it's a one in a blue moon era that you get on the screen, I wouldn't worry about it, no need to call this.
Robin
It's a bit like when you're making a mobile phone call, sometimes you make a mobile call, the call drops or the other person can't hear you or you can't hear them, all you do is switch your, you know, just try again isn't it, you just end the call and try again.
Robin
You don't call Vodafone if you lose one call, but if you're losing lots of calls, you might. It's a bit like that with any web -based system, the occasional error, the occasional glitch is just sort of unfortunately part of life these days.
Robin
As a reminder, when I was putting the slides together for this webinar, this happened to me, Google slides glitched on me, just came up with this, an error has occurred, I had to refresh my browser and it went away.
Robin
So sometimes you can't do, you know, there's no need to report it, just refresh your browser, log out, log in and just try again. But what happens if you can't get on to Alpha Tracker, sort of when you've tried that sort of thing and you still can't get on?
Robin
Well, first thing to do is to check with the other people on your system, so the other people in the office. If they can get on and you can't, well, it's going to be something to do with your setup. So it's worth trying to troubleshoot that first.
Robin
If you have a password problem, forget your password, there's actually a forget password link on the login page and Alpha Tracker, do try that first before giving us a call. But if nobody in your office can access Alpha Tracker, or you've all got the same error message, that's an immediate and urgent call through to us, so that we can help you.
Robin
Our urgent calls, by the way, we will deal with them immediately, and we say two hours as a maximum, so within two hours for sure. So just give us a call and we'll sort that out. Hopefully that sums up those sort of the basics of what to do if you've got a problem like that.
Robin
Don't anything else worth chipping in with a sort of a full-time problem like that?
Dan
I think that's probably covered everything there. You will go on to some other points later on to do with speeds and things like that. But I think that's probably covered everything just from a general problem point of view.
Robin
Great. Okay. Well, so next one, then what happens if you're waiting for report? And what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop into Alpha Tracker for this. This is our demo system. This, as I mentioned, one of the most common calls to our help desk.
Robin
I help desk gets about 800 calls a month across our hundreds of consultancy clients from our hundreds of clients. So 800 calls a month, roughly. And this is one of the most common. Now, when you generate a document, a report in Alpha Tracker, some of them are generated in a queue.
Robin
And that's because they can take many minutes to generate. If you've got an asbestos survey report with hundreds or thousands of samples in it, it's going to take some time to produce. That's just the way it is.
Robin
Some of our documents, though, do actually generate instantly, by the way. Quotes now do. We're moving to bulk certificates, the same process. But asbestos reports generally will be generated in the queue.
Robin
So you may have requested a document a few minutes ago, five minutes ago. You haven't received it and you're wondering what's going on. Well, there's a screen that you can use to tell if you're actually stuck in the queue or not or stuck behind somebody else.
Robin
And it's the document requests screen. So if I'm bringing that up on the screen here, I just started typing documents in our search box. You may not have access to this, by the way, but somebody in your organization will.
Robin
And this allows us to look at active documents or documents that are waiting in the queue or all. I'm actually on all at the moment. Now, if I look on waiting, great. There are actually three documents waiting to be produced at the moment, all requested by Dan.
Robin
Thank you, Dan. That was very convenient. And there's one probably that's yes, there is. There's one actually generating. So if I looked in this list, so that's just I've only got two now waiting. If I looked in this list and saw the document that I was waiting for, which if I look here, I can see that the project number that is T1.
Robin
And I can see that I'm behind somebody else. That probably saves you a phone call to us because it just means your documents being generated. It's going to happen as you're just behind somebody else in the queue.
Robin
You can actually, if you have multiple queues, now lots of our clients do have multiple queues, you can move documents around in the queues. So if you can see that there are five documents in queue one, but none in queue two, you could actually move your document to queue two if you want, just by changing the number here.
Robin
The other screen that's really useful is the performance dashboard. Now the performance dashboard, again, you may not have this on your login, but somebody in your organization will. This tells you how long on average you're needing to wait for your documents today.
Robin
So on our demo system here, we've set it up today to show that at the moment a 34, and that's why it's in red, 34 minute average document time just on our demo system. So if you've been waiting 10 minutes, and this says 34 minutes on average, again, you can probably expect to just wait for your document to come through in 20 minutes time.
Robin
If though you've been waiting half an hour and this says two minutes, well there's something probably gone wrong and that's worth giving us a call. So two things you can check there for documents. One is that document request screen.
Robin
Secondly, you can look on this figure on the performance dashboard. Now that brings us very nicely to something else I wanted to show you on the performance dashboard. So what is this all about here?
Robin
This app deck score, which on our demo system is showing us 100 now and 87 over the last 24 hours. So this is the third sort of agenda point for our webinar today. This is what do you do and what can you check if Alpha Tracker isn't running as quickly as it normally does or as you'd like it to.
Robin
This app deck score is a general performance score that tells you how quickly Alpha Tracker is working in the cloud. 100 is the best score you can have. So it's a figure from 0 to 100 and 100 means every single transaction that we monitor is happening really fast.
Robin
0 would mean no transactions that we monitor is happening even acceptably fast. In other words, they're all running slowly. Generally speaking, it'll be a number between 0 and 100 and the now figure just looks at the last quarter of an hour, whereas the 24 hour figure obviously looks at the average over the last 24 hours.
Robin
Now, as a rule of thumb, if that number is 80 and above, 85 and above, you'll think that Alpha Tracker is running quickly because it is. You know, you should see that Alpha Tracker is running really nicely for you.
Robin
Between 60 and 80, it's going to be okay. Below 60, you're going to find it disappointing. Now, the point here is this, if this is a very high number, but your experience is that it's running slowly, well, there's probably something wrong on your PC or in your web browser.
Robin
If, however, it's running slow for you and this is a really low number, then we need to know about it because there's something going on. In fact, we might already know about it because we monitor all Alpha Tracker systems, the Now score, we have it on a dashboard here in the office, and we can see it's colour coded so we can see systems that are going into the yellow or the red, which tells us that they've got a problem.
Robin
So we actually monitor them anyway, but it's worth calling us anyway. So if you see a figure here of 50 or 60 or even 70, give us a call because something's going on. Now, if this is a high number, but you're seeing slow performance, one of the things you can do, and here's a really good tip, is you can check the speed of the internet right down to your own web browser on your PC.
Robin
And you can do that. There's a website that I use, which is speedtest.net. You can just Google it as well. You can just type in internet speed check. And this, if I click go, will run a really comprehensive speed check from your web browser up to the internet, up to the cloud and back again.
Robin
The numbers you're looking for here, I always think, Dan, I don't know if you agree, but I'm thinking 10 and above should give you perfectly good performance. If you're on something like fiber at home, if you're working from home and you've got fiber broadband, you might see numbers here in the hundreds, which will be fantastic.
Robin
But 10 and above is okay. Anything below 10, and I think you're probably going to struggle, Dan, would you agree?
Dan
Yeah, I'd agree. I'd agree with that. Yeah, I think that sounds like a reasonable benchmark to aim for. Yeah, 10 and above, and you should be okay, anything lower, and you might start seeing a few performance issues.
Robin
So here in our office in Telford today, we've got 71 and down speed and 56 up. So this is really good as it should be. Because if you're working from home, you could easily see figures in the hundreds there.
Robin
But if you're seeing figures of one, two, three, or even less than one, then you've got an internet problem. It might be that you're connecting on a train. I actually saw somebody log into Alpha Tracker on a train the other day.
Robin
They're on the seat opposite. I don't know what they were working for, but I saw them logging into Alpha Tracker. But train internet is dreadful, generally speaking. Sometimes if you share your hotspot on your mobile phone, that can be a bit ropey as well if you're in and out of signal.
Robin
So this is always a good check. So speed test, if you're having particular problems, but that figure that I just showed you, this app deck figure in your system is very high, that's a really good bet because it tells you whether the problem is with you or with the system at the other end.
Robin
So that's the performance dashboard and how to check if the system is running slow or whether it's your own PC. And then what I wanted to do is run you through a couple of tips for how to use the system efficiently.
Robin
And I'll start off with one that relates to opening projects or jobs you might call them in your system. I was talking to a user the other day that said they were having slow performance, and I was asking them what task they were actually doing.
Robin
They'd been given about 200 jobs to check to see if they could be closed. They were checking to see if the data was okay, whether the report had been issued and whether the job had been invoiced. And what they were doing is they were going to the project menu and they were typing in their project number.
Robin
So I've got one here I can use as an example. Pressing enter, that does the search. It actually opens the job screen here and then opens the job information itself on the screen now. And they were using this information, running through the details, checking the information out, and if it was ready to close, they were closing it from there.
Robin
And they were doing that and then they were closing this down and typing the next job number into the box there on the left -hand side. And they were doing that time after time after time again. Now, what that's doing, as you can see, is it's causing Alpha Tracker to generate the screen with all the jobs on each time that they search.
Robin
There's a much better way. So what I showed the person how to do was this. Instead of searching here, just bring up the project list or the job list. It may be called in your system. That brings up all open jobs.
Robin
Then you can bring up the searcher above the list. Now what I can do is I can type in my job number, which I think is that one, and it will give it me on the screen here. Now, maybe all information I need is already here, because if this was a real job, it would have all the dates filled in.
Robin
And I may see straight away that I could close it. I could also, of course, key in lots of job numbers here, which is really helpful, 57706. And this is going to open two jobs at the same time.
Robin
I can put commas between them. I can also do ranges. I can put a dash in and do a range. Or for that matter, I could put a client name in or a client ID and see all of the jobs for that client, because it's likely I'm working in the jobs for a particular client rather than just a random selection of jobs.
Robin
And from here, I can go straight into the jobs themselves. So I can just click the job number, open. I can click another job number and open. I can have multiple jobs open at the same time, which is really nice.
Robin
That can be a real time saver. But I'm working off the one list. So just by using the search at the top of the screen, I'm able to search much more efficiently than making Alpha Tracker open the screen time after time after time again.
Robin
Now, just by telling the caller about this searcher, which does when you open the list, it's closed. I think that's probably why some people don't see it, Dan. But once you've got it open, all of this is available to you.
Robin
You can search on virtually all of the fields in Alpha Tracker. And that's a much, much, much more efficient way of searching for a job to check the information in it.
Dan
Yeah, I definitely agree with you there Robin. I use the multiple project number search quite a lot and it's so useful having them just both there on the same screen and rather than jumping in and out each time.
Dan
That's much better for performance. If you're just looking for a one-off job, obviously the menu search is fine but if you've got a big task where you're going through lots of jobs and checking lots of things, yeah I think like you said having that one screen open and keeping it open and then just changing your parameters that seems to work nicely.
Robin
And the other one I wanted to show you was this. Now again, we had a call from a client who have hundreds of literally hundreds of site staff and they said they were finding the calendar a bit slow. So this is the staff calendar which I've got as a favourite button here but you can also get at it from the menu.
Robin
Let me show you what they were doing. So they were checking the diaries for individual members of staff and typically one or two or three staff together because they were working as teams for a particular client.
Robin
On our demo system I've only got perhaps 20 people here but they have hundreds literally. What they were doing was selecting everybody, clicking calendar and then from this screen, so with hundreds of names in this list, they were then picking the people that they were interested in and working in their diary.
Robin
So perhaps Catherine, Dan and Jack, or Catherine, Judy and Kim and you can see what they were up to and they were finding this a little bit slow. Here is a much better way to do it. So don't select everybody but select the individuals that you're interested in.
Robin
So Catherine, Dan and Jack in this case, click calendar and it opens those three people's diaries on a tab look here and now if I wanted to open a different team I can just deselect everybody then this time I'll go with Robin, Russ and Tina and you'll see it opens this in a separate tab but it leaves that one open as well so I can now switch between those two different teams of three people just on the tabs.
Robin
I could even do it again if I wanted so this time I'll just go with Jess, Jess and Jack and now I've got three different groups of people and I can work in their diaries all at the same time. I can also of course if I've got multiple screens, multiple monitors, I could open these in separate monitors.
Robin
You can have you know two, three, four, five screens now attached to a laptop. That's really efficient so if you're working in multiple diaries all at the same time you can actually open them on separate screens.
Robin
Now doing it this way is so much faster. Not only have you got access to everybody all that you need all the time but you'll just find interacting with the diaries is really quick. As you can imagine if you're opening a calendar with 200 people in it and you've got all of the people listed here behind the scenes Alpha Tracker is keeping all of that diary you know sort of in mind as you're working and it's not going to be quick so this is a really big time saver.
Robin
Dan I think you wanted to add some stuff.
Dan
I was just going to say to that, so while you can pick and choose which staff members you want, what's really cool is the options you've got on the right-hand side, the team group and office sections.
Dan
So if you spend a bit of time setting up your staff list and making sure people are in the right office and the right group and even team, so you can select who's in a particular team or who's in a particular group of people, so for example surveyors or lab staff things like that, you can actually just select the option on the right-hand side and that'll pick all the appropriate people in that particular group.
Dan
So it's an easy way for you to find the right people without having to go, oh we'll pick Dan, Robin, Jack and Kim for example, you can just click on whatever team they're in or whatever office they're in and then it will select all of those straight away.
Dan
It's a nice quick way of selecting preset groups of people essentially.
Robin
Good tip, good tip. Yeah, there's lots of ways of grouping people together in Alpha Tracker. And if you the more you more time you spend getting that right, the quicker it is just to find you around the system because those lists appear in lots of places in Alpha Tracker.
Robin
So that little bit of investment to get yourself set up in the first place pays dividends. So there's a good tip about the diary. And if you'd use it that way, you'll find it's quick, no matter how many hundred site stuff that you have.
Robin
So I think that's our 20 minutes up near enough. I'll just have a quick recap, while Dan just checks to see if there's any outstanding questions. People have been quiet today. I think it's the we've got lots of people in on the chat in on the webinar, but either I've talked too fast, and nobody's followed anything that I've said is what I normally do.
Robin
Or it's the first day back after a long weekend, and everyone's just chilling over a sandwich. If you do have any questions, now is the time to stick them in the Q&A chat so that Dan can interrupt me.
Robin
Otherwise, I'll just recap where we what we were trying to cover off today. So if you can't access Alpha Tracker at all, I've got an error message, just first thing to do is just try logging out, logging in, closing your browser, going back in that sort of thing, do the basics.
Robin
If nobody in your office can access it, or whatever, obviously, that's a call to us, high priority call, we'll deal with that straight away. But do ask your colleagues first, we do occasionally get calls in the help desk where people haven't done that.
Robin
And in fact, it's just their PC that's got a problem. If you're waiting for a document, so you've generated a big asbestos report, and you're wondering when you're going to get it, you can actually check the queues yourself, or somebody in your office can, your super user can.
Robin
If you find things a bit slow, look on the performance dashboard, have a look at that app deck score. 100 means it's running Alpha Track is running at full speed, really good performance. Zero would mean it was dreadful.
Robin
It's generally somewhere between 80 and 100. That's what we're aiming for. And if it's 80 to 100, you should be finding things acceptable. If the score that's shown on the dashboards a high score, but you're finding it slow, try logging out, try closing your browser, go back in, is it any better?
Robin
If it isn't any better, give us a call. But before you give us a call, do that internet speed check. Because that's the first question we're going to ask you just to make sure that your PC and your internet are actually working okay.
Robin
And then finally, I showed a couple of tips there about how to work most efficiently in screen. So bring up a list of projects or quotes, or whatever it is, and use the search above the list. If you've got lots of work to do in that particular area, don't keep searching from the menu, you'll find it's much quicker.
Robin
And if you're working with calendars, only open the people that you need. It's much, much faster to do that. Any questions, Dan, or are we be just wrapping up?
Dan
I think we're just wrapping up, everyone seems to be quiet this afternoon.
Robin
In which case, I'll just remind you the numbers. You can call us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days of the year. There's always going to be a human being ready to take your call. They're local rate numbers.
Robin
If you're in the UK, there's the number on the screen on the left-hand side. That's our office that me and Dan are in at the moment. And if you're in Australia or New Zealand, there's the number to call on the right-hand side.
Robin
Call us out of hours. You may end up speaking to another country, but don't worry. It's just a local rate call to you and everyone will be able to access your system and help. Thanks again for joining our webinar.
Robin
Next one will be at the end of next month. We don't have a topic yet for next month. So if you want to suggest something, drop us a line or give us a call and we'll cover off the most sort of suggested topics next month in the Alpha Tracker tips and tricks webinar.
Robin
I knew I wouldn't be able to get that one. Thanks again and see you next time.
Copyright © 2024 START SOFTWARE - Registered in England No: 5940522 - All Rights Reserved
Alpha Tracker Asbestos Software - Start Software