Collision Resolution Error

Purpose

The goal of this page is to give you an understanding what is happening behind the scenes at TrackAbout when you are trying to resolve a collision and you run into this:

Collisions - Link to review

To review what collisions are and how to resolve them please go here:

Collisions

What happens when a Collision Resolution Error happen?

TrackAbout Support proactively monitors these errors the same way we monitor Sync Problems. The work flow for these issues follow this flow:

• An error is generated in TrackAbout and emailed to the Support Team as a ticket.
• Once the ticket is in the support queue it will be addressed as quickly as possible
• After the problem has been resolved, a TrackAbout Support Specialist will email the customer that attempted to resolve the collision.
  • There are times that our attempts to resolve the underlying problem did not resolve the issue or that it uncovered another issue with that collision resolution. If that happens then when that collision is attempted again, a new error will be generated and sent to TrackAbout.

The Underlying Cause

There are two issues that make up the vast majority of collision resolution errors and they are based on two of the "golden rules" of the TrackAbout asset tracking system. A customer's balance cannot fall below zero, unless another configuration permits it (see Exchange Balances) and two different records cannot have the exact same effective date/time.

Potential Negative Not Scanned (NS) balance

These errors occur when the resolution of a collision would reduce a balance to below zero. Because TrackAbout does not allow a customer balance to fall below zero, an error is generated. Generally the underlying cause will be a Reduce NS balance, Customer Audit, or RightSize action that has been performed on a customer account.

1. An action that would return an asset causes a collision - This collision is not resolved promptly. If it were resolved at this point, no collision resolution error would occur.
2. The customer balance is modified through a bulk action, such as a Customer Audit.
3. An attempt to resolve the collision from step 1 now generates an error because it is attempted to reduce the customer balance and that balance was already reduce via an Audit (or similar action)

Same Effective Date

This issue if pretty straight forward. The Collision that you are attempting to resolve would create a record that has the same effective date as a record that already exists in the system.

When an action is saved in TrackAbout via a mobile device the time captured is down to the second. You will notice in the screenshot above that the time is 2:42:55. Because these records have a time captured to the second, it is very unlikely that they will encounter a Same Effective Date Error. Not to say that it is impossible for an action on a mobile device to have this type of conflict, but the majority of these errors come from records that are created on the website - Edit, locate, add new, invoices, maintenance, etc. These records will end in :00 as the user is not able to choose the time down to the second.

If you are attempting to save a record on the website with an effective date that already exists, you have seen this error message:

The same rules apply to collisions as current actions being saved to the system.