What is Cascading Workflow?
Cascading workflow is a feature of the underlying database logic that our Eleos integration employs to incorporate with various TMS systems as drivers move through order workflow in the application. Simply put, its purpose is to analyze workflow events as they are happening in real-time and use that data to update current and future trips to reflect the expected sequence of events and their times more accurately. This should result in trip planning being much easier to follow based on what Eleos knows about the current state of events. Once the updated order occurs, it will still be updated in real-time as drivers progress through their actual loading times and other workflow events.
As an example, consider a planned schedule for 2 orders, one at 10AM and the next at 12 noon. If the first order were to be delayed by 2 hours and not begin until noon, Eleos’ database logic would notice this, compare the new expected end time based on the previous plan and “bump” the future trip forward by an equal amount. The resulting trip plan would now show the current order beginning at 12 noon, and the next order updating to begin at 2PM.
How does Cascading Work?
Eleos processes workflow events coming from the app in near real-time, often within 1-2 seconds of that event occurring. As Eleos processes these events, it constantly checks the chronology of all events surrounding the current action on the current shift to make sure that they are both in order and non-overlapping. This has the potential to alter times slightly for past events, but the focus is on ensuring future chronological order to support planning schedule adjustments for maximum accuracy.
To be clear, many TMS systems (TMW included) have no issue with overlapping trips from a data integrity standpoint – this will generally cause no errors and will not make those trips be processed differently as a result. The desired benefit is primarily for planning, enabling back-office users who wish to know the current state of an order and how any changes may affect subsequent orders to get an accurate summary of that information.
FAQ
Why is Eleos moving trip times into the future?
In general, the underlying database logic is shifting times around based on current events happening later than they were originally planned and doing its best to adjust them to have the same scale of time that they had in their original plan. This is not always the result of lateness – there are many factors that determine when trips get moved and in what direction, of which the technical details go beyond the scope of this document. In any event, once the trip is being executed by a driver, Eleos will update trip events to reflect the times that they actually took place.
A trip time was moved forward much further then usual, why did that happen?
There are many situations that can cause Eleos to move a trip very far forward, in rare cases several days later than what is expected, and it is difficult to diagnose exactly what caused the integration to make this determination without examining specific examples. If that trip remains attributed to the same shift and does not significantly disrupt a plan or cause other problems, it should be safe to leave as is. Similar to the above, once a driver begins their workflow for that order, Eleos will update the trip to reflect when it actually occurred.
Dispatch and planning schedules vary between companies, and each have unique needs. If you find that Eleos is moving trips in a way that causes back-office issues or believe something to be incorrect or erroneous, please get in touch with us.
Is it possible to customize or disable this feature?
Yes! Most features in Eleos, web services, and our database infrastructure are designed to be customizable to fit a wide variety of use-cases and needs. Please get in touch with us if you would like to adjust it to better suit your needs or disable it altogether.