While we were assisting on a TMW implementation for one of our clients, a problem arose for which there was no current solution.  Oil Field Order Entry did not have a way to distinguish the different types of tickets that oil haulers were getting.  There were tickets that were measured using a flow meter, tickets calculated based on the height of the tank, or tickets that were closeouts for the end of a period.  Different measurement criteria were needed for each ticket, and both the drivers and the dispatchers needed a way to know what criteria was needed, and promptly.

Our solution was to use a Commodity Code (typically used in TMWSuite Fuel Dispatch/Field Services to separate out tickets according to whether they were oil, petroleum, so forth) and then utilize this for the different ticket types.  We created Commodity Codes with subtypes: CRD-TTG (Crude Total Gallons), CRD-MTR (Crude Meter Tickets), and CRD-MAN (Crude Manifests).  This is what the user selects when they initially start an oil ticket.

On the Mobile Communications side, this drives what fields are shown to the user for measurement purposes. Whether it be the start and end of the meter reading, or the feet, inches and quarters of each height measurement. On the Dispatch side, we used the Commodity Codes to drive alerts in order entry.  When the CRD-TTG Commodity Code was select, certain fields would be highlighted in different colors to show which were required for the entry, or numbers that were out of the specifications for that ticket type.

We were able to take a specification that was needed for a client and make a user-friendly interface, so that the different ticket types could be recognized by dispatchers, drivers, virtually anyone who happened to observe the ticket.