SmartLanes User Guide

You have a portfolio. You know there are connections in it you're not seeing — programs that overlap, funding lines that touch the same technology areas, projects that are closer to each other than anyone realizes. SmartLanes shows you those connections. Not as a report you have to build, not as a pivot table you have to maintain — as a live, interactive diagram you can explore in real time.

New to SmartLanes? Start with the SmartLanes — Configuration Guide for setup instructions and an overview of what SmartLanes can do.

Navigating a SmartLane

A SmartLane displays data in horizontal lanes stacked vertically. Each lane represents a level in the hierarchy.

• Non-entity lanes (top) — Grouping or categorization fields that define how items are organized

• Entity lane (bottom) — The individual records. Each entity card represents a single item in your dataset

Lines connect items across lanes, showing which entities belong to which groups and how categories relate to each other.

Drilling Down

Click any item in a lane to drill down. When you select an item:

1. Its connections across all lanes are highlighted

2. Unrelated items fade out so you can focus on relevant relationships

3. Continue clicking to narrow your view further, tracing a specific path through the data

This is especially useful when tracing how a specific project connects to funding sources, technology areas, and organizational sponsors.

Using AI Search

If your SmartLane has AI features enabled, a search box appears at the top of the view. The AI search uses natural language processing tuned for DoD terminology to find relevant items across your data.

Search — Type a query in plain language — for example, "autonomous underwater vehicles" or "cybersecurity research" — and SmartLanes highlights matching entities and their connections.

Similarity — Select an entity to find other items with similar descriptions, keywords, or attributes. This helps identify related or potentially duplicative efforts across your portfolio.

Grouping — AI automatically clusters related entities, revealing patterns that aren't visible through manual categorization.

From SmartLanes to Gary

Once you've identified what you want to explore further, open Gary from your SmartList to go deeper. Gary works from the same underlying data — he can explain the relationships the SmartLane surfaces, flag anomalies, and help you decide what to do next.

Try asking Gary:

• "Which programs in this SmartLane are most similar to each other?"

• "Are there any funding lines with significant overlap across these technology areas?"

Understanding Colors

Administrators can apply color formatting to lanes and entities. Colors typically indicate status or health, category membership, or priority and risk level. Check with your workspace administrator if the color coding isn't immediately clear.

Tips

• Start at the top and work down — select a high-level grouping lane first, then drill into the specific item you want to trace. The structure reveals itself as you go.

• AI search is your fastest path to a specific item — when you know what you're looking for but not where it lives in the hierarchy, type it in plain language and let SmartLanes find it.

• Similarity analysis finds what you weren't looking for — use it when you suspect duplicates or want to surface related efforts across organizational boundaries you wouldn't have thought to cross manually.

• Sparse visualizations are a data quality signal, not a SmartLanes problem — if your diagram looks thin, the underlying list probably has incomplete field values. Check your list configuration before assuming something is misconfigured.

Troubleshooting

My AI search box isn't appearing. AI features must be enabled by an administrator. If you don't see the search box, contact your CORAS admin or CSM to confirm AI configuration is active for your SmartLane.

My entities aren't displaying correctly. Confirm that the Entity Display Mapping Key is set to the same field as the Entity Lane. This is the most common source of display issues.

My SmartLane loaded but some items are missing. Confirm that Show All Entities is enabled in the Entity Lane configuration. Without it, only items with active connections may appear.

Get Help

Contact your Customer Success Manager or visit the Customer Resource Center for additional support with SmartLanes navigation and configuration.