Problem: Need to be able to look at the Schedule screen and determine quickly which one of 4 ‘regions’ any of our threetechsare scheduled in on any particular day (all techs work in all ‘regions’) so we can schedule a new workorder within the same region immediately before or after the scheduled workorder to save fuel costs and drive time. Color coding a scheduled workorder by dispatch zone would be the solution so that at a quick glance, you can see the next time a tech is scheduled in that region.
Current idea: Use Priority field as a temporary ‘Region’ field and create different colored flags for the 4 regoins and make that a selection everytime a workorder is created.
Issues: 1) Currently we loaded all our cities/towns in the Dispatch Zone grid because we wanted to be able to at least see the cities in the Schedule view of a workorder, but because you can’t add the client’s City field to the pop-up in Global Settings, we had to do a workaround using Dispatch Zone. Even then, it’s stilldifficult to quickly see which tech isin the target zoneeven with the city information on the screen. We hate to ‘cobble up’ the grids to try and make it work our way. Any advice/guidance would be appreciated.
Hi
If your techsare assigned to service only acertain Dispatch Zone, normally a suggestion would be to make Scheduleable User Groups based on the Dispatch Zone that user was assigned to so you could quickly see by selecting that Scheduleable User Group and viewing the techs that are specifically assigned to that Dispatch Zone by their user entry screen, but because your techs are not really set for a specific Dispatch Zone, that won’t work in your situation.
So your idea of using Priorities as your “regions” if you want to be able to quickly see via the color code of the flag which “region” the tech is scheduled sounds like a good idea.
Or as Dispatch Zone is an available field tag to display via the Workorder Item Summary Template in Global Settings,edit that so that it shows the Dispatch Zone on the display, then that works too for you to also quickly see at a glance where the tech is assigned to by the Dispatch Zone - for example the screen shot below in addition to showing the client name, tech name, also shows the Dispatch Zone.
You can edit your Workorder Item Summary Template to display whatever tags you wish from those available, but you are correct, the City of the client the scheduled workorder item is for is not an available tag
Thechallengewe run into regarding the Zone: text showing the city is that when we’re typically trying to schedule aworkorder in the next few weeks, we’re highlighting a two week span on the calendar so those two weeks show up on the right side of the screen for each of our three techs, resulting in an abbreviated workorder image that doesn’t display the information unless you do a mouse over. Then we’d have to mouse over every WO to see where they are (see attached .zip file of a screen shot of our schedule) and that’s what we’re trying to avoid.
At this point, we’ll continue using the Priority field - seems to be satisfying the need for now. Thanks for your feedback. I’ll have more posts in the other areas as we continue to ‘tune’ the system to our needs.
