Matt Rost is the Executive Director of Orbit Operations. Matt manages the Orbit Product Development, Implementation, Support and Consulting functions. In this blog post he discusses Orbit’s latest version release and his plans for the product in 2021. You can see the new features of Version 6 in his recent webinar.
Version 6 Empowers the Local Safety Officer
The biggest driving factor this past year – for version 6 – was streamlining the system for local safety officers. We held deep-dive sessions with our clients to review the system’s functionality and user interface. Local safety officers usually don’t access the system frequently, so we wanted to simplify the screens and put the important information right up front.
We focused on two aspects: getting the correct information to the local markets while supporting them so they can achieve compliance locally and collecting the appropriate information so decisions can be made globally. What it comes down to is making the work for the local markets easier while staying in compliance locally and globally.
Intuitive and Powerful Features
Our latest release included over 250 new features and improvements, including:
New ways to manage your workload
We added a new interface for users to update tasks in one location regardless of the product, market, or commitment type. The ability to see all upcoming work and complete it in one place is a huge benefit to productivity and ease-of-use.
Flexibility for Regulator Timelines
The next is the ability to place tracked items “On Hold.” Additional Risk Minimization Measures are sent from global teams to local markets, but it’s really the local team that knows when the product may come to their market which drives when they need to do the work. This feature allows them to share that expertise back with global, guiding their local process while reporting on status and justification back to the global team. This feature lets the LSO report back to Global Safety in a succinct manner that this aRMM activity is not happening right now and will be revisited in the future.
More email options for greater impact
We also revamped our email notifications to give system owners more options. This empowers admins to create very specific and meaningful notifications for their users.
Users can @Mention (at-mention) in the comments of tracked items, activities, and milestones. This feature lets the user tag other users in comments and Orbit will send them an email notification automatically. It’s intuitive and makes it easier for users to transition from commercial social media products to Orbit and bring that simple capability into their work.
2021 Brings New Visualizations and Integrations
Looking on the horizon for Orbit 7: It’s always a focus for us to keep moving the product forward and support existing clients in their tracking efforts. We have new requests for up-and-coming trackers, which we are excited to share with the world once they are ready for launch. We are also currently holding focus groups with our clients to identify updates to Orbit and business process improvements we can implement in future versions. Some new features you can look forward to in our next release include new integrations and new ways to search and access information in Orbit.
We have mature tracking solutions for different PV processes, and we want to think of new ways to bring these functional areas in Orbit together. This will help high-level management manage resources, forecast whether outsourcing partners or service providers will need to be engaged, and prioritize work. Once we have finished Version 6, this will be the next priority for the team.
You are the Future of Orbit
Orbit’s System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) focuses on continuous feedback and improvements. We keep our clients at the center of new features, new workflows, and new ways to optimize your commitments.
If you are an existing Orbit client, you can contact your Project Manager or account manager if have improvements or suggestions. We have a Joint Application Development session every year at The Orbit Summit where we share these ideas with the Orbit community, but you don’t have to hold onto ideas until then. We are always open to new features and improvements.
If you are not an existing client and you would like to discuss upcoming version releases, new use cases, or see a demo of version 6, then you can contact us or see a preview in our Version 6 Release webinar.
