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Scheduling Module Overview

The Scheduling Module manages time-based scheduling requirements including the scheduling of people, equipment, stages, edit bays, trucks, machine rooms, and so on. Resources can be scheduled in a variety of ways while the system dynamically checks for conflicts, ensuring that you always know what is available and when. Scheduling information is shown in Schedule Book’s completely interactive graphical screen display, providing a complete visual picture of all scheduling activities.

SCHEDULING RESOURCES AND SCHEDULING GROUPS APPLICATIONS

The Scheduling Resource Application allows you to create and maintain detailed records of all the resources you employ. A resource can be a person, a piece of equipment, a room, a truck, or anything else you need to schedule. The application also allows users to define a resource’s roster, which is the regular work schedule. This information can be supplemented with other planned time off (vacation, personal days, etc.) to get a true sense of when a resource is available to be scheduled. Rosters can be set to display on the Schedule Book and can generate conflicts if work is scheduled for a resource’s time off period.

The Scheduling Group Application allows you to manage your resources by placing them into groups; a group is a collection of resources. A single resource can belong to many different scheduling groups. For example, you may have an engineering staff, and you may want to have all those engineers show up as members of a Technical Personnel group but also include some of your engineers in a group called Senior Engineers. Through the tight integration with the Job Management Module, billing can be processed for each resource depending on the group from which they are scheduled.

SCHEDULE BOOK APPLICATION

The Schedule Book is the core application of the Scheduling Module. It offers a multitude of features for creating new bookings and maintaining existing ones including the use of a “click-and-drag” technique. As bookings are added or changed, the system updates the display in real time.

The interface of the Schedule Book is dynamic and very flexible, offering many options of how to view bookings. You can add many tab pages, each of which can show completely different booking information from the other tabs. This gives you the ability to manage resources and bookings for a variety of situations and periods of time. On each tab page you can easily zoom in, zoom out, change the amount of time displayed, increase the level of detail on the screen, and control many other parameters of the display. All changes can be made on the fly or saved as a Schedule View, which is a set of preferred display characteristics.

Bookings can be added to the Schedule Book in many ways, but three key methods are through “quick holds,” orders, and resource rosters. Quick holds allow you to block out time for multiple resources with a minimum amount of information – it merely holds the time open until the order is confirmed. A quick hold can be easily converted it into a work order. Bookings can also be made when a resource is assigned to a work order transaction line item or via a resource’s roster (as set up on the resource record).

CONFLICT CHECKING

The system automatically checks for resource conflicts during the booking process, and if found, schedulers are immediately notified. Conflicts can be created, for example, when two or more work orders are booked that require the same resource for any period of overlapping time.

Additionally, the automated conflict checking can be set to look to resources’ rosters, so when you attempt to schedule resources for times when they are either not available or become unavailable (e.g., illness) the system will alert you.

You can control the degree to which conflicts display in the Schedule Book to achieve maximum visibility.

BOOK MULTIPLE RESOURCES VIA TEMPLATES

An unlimited number of “scheduling templates” (work order templates assigned to a scheduling group) can be created to save time when booking new orders. Scheduling templates comprise a set of resources, one of which has been designated as the “key resource” for the template.

When the key resource is booked, the system will automatically book all of the other resources in the template for that same work order. Any changes can then be made as necessary to add, delete, or modify the details for any of the resources booked for the order.