Workflow
Workflow software that tells your team what to do next, and when.
Every job and consol carries its own milestones. Each person's workflow screen shows the ones that are theirs, colour-coded by what is due and what is overdue, so nothing waits for someone to remember it.
The Problem
Every operator carries the job list in their head
Import and export jobs move through dozens of steps across forwarding, customs, transport and billing. When the sequence lives in people's heads, in diaries and in inboxes, steps get skipped, deadlines slip past unnoticed, and the first warning is a customer on the phone.
Expedient's Workflow module puts the sequence in the system. Each job gets its milestones, each milestone has a due condition and an owner, and each person's workflow screen shows exactly what is theirs to do next, with overdue and skipped steps flagged in colour.
Milestone-Driven Job and Consol Tracking
Every import and export job, and every air and sea consol, is allocated a sequence of milestones from creation to completion. You define the sequence per job profile (department, job type, mode, container class), and the job's status is always the last milestone completed, visible in the top corner of the registration screen.
A Colour-Coded Workflow Screen
Each user's workflow screen lists the jobs and consols where the next step is theirs, in ETA order by default. Overdue milestones show in red, skipped steps in yellow, and you can colour-band jobs by how many days they are from ETA, so priorities are obvious at a glance without opening each job.
Exception Conditions on Every Milestone
Set a due condition against each milestone in plain terms: completed 24 hours prior to ETA, or no later than 48 hours after job registration. A job that misses one becomes an exception, and the workflow screen and exception reports flag it before a customer has to ring and ask.
Conditional and Event-Triggered Milestones
Some milestones only appear when something happens: a customs hold response adds a matching 'cleared' milestone to the job, and one event can automatically log another or complete a milestone on the same job or on every job in the consol. EDI import jobs get their own milestone set too.
Customer-Specific Milestones and Exemptions
Give a customer their own milestone set, which Expedient applies ahead of the generic profile, or exempt named clients from milestones that do not apply to them. Customer groups such as automotive or pharmaceutical route those jobs only to the staff who specialise in them, with overrides by destination port.
Work Groups and Roles
Tag each milestone with a category (forwarding, customs, transport, accounting), tie categories to user roles, then build work groups by branch, department and mode. A user can hold more than one role in more than one team, and locking a job shows colleagues who is already working on it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Expedient decide what shows up on someone's workflow screen?
A job or consol appears in your workflow when the next milestone to be completed, or a skipped one, falls in a category tied to your role, and the job matches your work group's branch, department, mode and customer group. Stream roles can bring a job into a team's workflow earlier, for example handing a job to transport as soon as the last forwarding milestone is done. Work groups can also filter by destination port so multi-branch operations see the right jobs in the right office. Export workflow mirrors the import side, with its own milestones, work groups and role categories.
Do staff have to tick off every milestone by hand?
No. Most milestones are system events: Expedient records them automatically when a user performs the action through the normal menus or when a background process such as an interface runs, so the milestone completes as part of doing the work. Manual milestones exist for tasks done outside the system, and repeating milestones can be checked without changing the job status. When every milestone is completed or marked not applicable, the job moves to completed on its own.
Can different customers have different milestones?
Yes. Customer-specific job, order and booking milestones are checked first, before the generic profile, so a customer with a special process gets their own sequence. Individual clients can be exempted from specific milestones, and customer groups let you route a customer's jobs to a specialist team, with overrides by job type, department and destination port when the same customer is handled differently in different states.
See the workflow screen for your operation
Talk to us about setting up milestones, work groups and roles for your team.