Calendar & Scheduling Improvements
The calendar should be able to show or hide the various technicians schedules.
The calendar item should clearly show the Client Name / Suburb in the view so that jobs can allocated depending where the tech will be at that time of day.
The calendar should be able to be used to add a ticket / Field Job. A typical workflow is:
Client calls.
Inform us of their issues that need assistance with.
They as when are we available.
We can the calendar and recommend days/times based on when the tech is in their area (to avoid excess travel time etc).
We book the job in via the calendar by dragging the cursor to highlight the start & duration time.
Job screen is display allowing you to put in the job / ticket information.
Job is dispatched to the tech!
That's it!
180 Degrees IT
shared this idea
This has been out for a couple months:
http://www.repairshopr.com/blog/posts/feature-friday-calendar-scheduler-view
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Ryan (CTO, Pinellas Computers)
commented
@Dean: Agree on all points.
Especially on point iii - I hate how it resets to 8:00am when you click on it. Sometimes I click it to just adjust by 30 minutes and forget what it was originally and then I'm screwed...
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Dean
commented
c. When creating a new calendar appointment,
i. we need to be able to select time on a calendar. Or at least have it warn us of double ups of appointment times. At the moment, we can view the calendar in a new window, but it’s a bit of a pain.ii. The slider to pick times isn’t very intuitive. Now that I know how it works it is ok, but a drop down similar to how Outlook works would be best.
iii. When editing an existing appointment, Even just clicking on the appointment time field will reset it back to [Today 8:00AM], It needs to remember the previous time. I just had one where I needed to change the time from 8am to 10 am tomorrow, it changed it to 10 today because I didn’t realise it was reset to today.
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180 Degrees IT
commented
Thanks for your reply Ryan!
The calendar isn't a deal breaker for us as with our current PSA, it too also had a calendar that wasn't fully compatible with Office 365.
Our solution was to have a special tech only calendar in Gmail, and we use that when making bookings with clients.
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Ryan (CTO, Pinellas Computers)
commented
Sounds like a reasonable modification. You basically want the suburb/city visible in the field jobs blocks, so that looking at the calendar a scheduler can make a quick decision on where to book a job. As a temporary solution, you can have your scheduling techs make the "summary" of the field job contain the suburb/city. That's probably more imporatant (at a glance) than the problem description. Would you agree?
As far as wanting to be able to "create ticket" using the calendar view, do you mean like in Outlook? Like the idea of "create ticket on highlighted time spot"? As a temporary solution, maybe you can view the schedule on the field jobs tab, and then ctrl+click the ticket tab to start from there. You could then take the customer's info / ticket info, and then click "field job" next to "assets". This will bring up a new window where you can set the date/time, and even view a popup of the calendar for reference. Does this help?
In the meantime I know this: Chuck and I have both collaborated with Troy and Robert on the idea of improving the calendar (Exchange/365, two-way sync, etc) via email and phone on multiple occasions. At this point in time, it seems there is a lot of "custom plug-ins and programming" in the way of turning the calendar into a more powerful tool. I'm pretty sure it's on the list for a total overhaul sometime in the future. I know the RS dev team is looking into bringing on specialists to help bring the calendar to another level, but for now, it's better than nothing.