The AIRPEX Newsletter
We will try to tell you about the latest changes in AIRPEX, our plans for the future and where we think the use of computers in the Transportation Industry will go in the future.
Please send any articles about your successes or any other topic you may think appropriate to Ad.
The first step in any move is to reduce what you have to move and we worked for weeks to shed ourselves of much of the detritus of twenty years of operation. Finally, we packed everything and the movers came in. Since we moved on Saturday, we only lost about 1/2 day of work time. We were up and fully operational Monday morning.
The new space is in a 3-story office town house. The top floor houses Dennis, Stuart, Ed and Greg. The ground floor has Ad, Susan and Donald. We have a conference room, kitchen, storage and computers in the basement. Please come and see us soon.
BMS's new address is:
Our main phone numbers are unchanged. They are (703)591-0911 for voice and (703)591-6154 for FAX. The modem numbers did change but have been entered on all systems.
We are in the process of writing context sensitive HTML help files for all application programs. This will take a while, but it will greatly enhance our system.
These capabilities will also enable you to set up home pages on the Web with ties to the data contained in your databases. There will be some cost involved. For performance and security reasons the web site must reside on a completely separate computer system with direct serial connections to your main system. You will also need to contract with an Internet connection provider.
The benefit is that your customers will be able to use the Internet to inquire into the status of their shipments, order your services and learn about your company.
If you want to learn more about this new capability, call Ad.
This certainly seems to be a good idea to us and we hope it does to you also. We think that there might be three groups, devoted to Import, Export and Domestic. Possibly the Export and Domestic groups could be combined.
Connor has offered to host the first of these meetings. We hope to schedule the first of them for April or May. Please let us know your ideas on this matter and whether or not you would be willing to participate.
The first is that each tape is assigned a unique ID. This does two things. The first is that we maintain a catalog of the contents of each tape which includes the date and time of each file on your system. If it is ever necessary to restore a particular file, we can find out right where it is. The second benefit of the Tape ID is that we can tell whether or not the tape has been changed. Not changing tapes can lead to loss of data, so you are warned by a program that runs each day if the tape has not been changed.
The backup is set to run automatically in the middle of the night. After the tape is created it is checked and you are notified of any errors. This is important because the most likely thing to fail on your system is the tape drive.
Finally, the results of this process are e-mailed to BMS each day and reviewed by Donald. You need to carefully review the mail you receive about backups, but Donald will probably be talking to you if there are problems.
The new screen allows you to enter or display additional HTS numbers along with the primary number. The CTRL field is used to identify secondary or additional HTS numbers. An "S" indicates that the HTS number is a second tariff number. The CTRL field can still be used to control how multiple lines with the same tariff number are combined on the 7501.
This screen displays more HTS lines than the regular worksheet entry screen so it has advantages when entering invoices with many lines of data.
These features are currently available and will be installed as upgrades to your system. If some of these features are especially important to you, give us a call and we will expedite the software updates to enable you to begin using the feature.