i would really like to just go online and get the wrokorders that we need for each tech and allow him to work with ayanova offline then upload later.
is there any time frame for this? month year? how about the internet interface like aras?
We do want to provide offline access - being able to upload and download in future releases.
Thank you again for these suggestions.
I like the sound of this. I have used MEDIMIZER while working for a previous employer, and we had the ability to run a scaled down version on a PDA, and sync at the end of the day. The main database would take any changes that we made, and assign a permanent number (workorder, equipmentID, etc) during the sync. We could also do this with a laptop running the full version.
I could live without the PDA support, but the standalone feature on the laptop would be great for those of us that are too cheap to pay the extra $60+ a month for wireless internet access through our cell phone providers.
Many years ago in the software that we designed, built and used in-house that became the basis for AyaNova you see today we had a system of downloading work orders and uploading them at the end of the day.
We used it in our own service company for a couple of years. I have a lot of personal experience with that kind of system in a busy shop from the software side and from the user side as a technician.
We had such a bad experience with it that we very carefully designed around the problem in AyaNova by considering every possible way that an offline system could be avoided. Which is why AyaNova has so much many remote connectivity options.
I can understand the thinking behind it fully and we will look at it down the road, but it’s going to be a major technical challenge to design around all the problems that can happen with it that we experienced ourselves with such a system.
Off the top of my head here are a few of the problems I recall and these were all occuring even with the best of intentions in the hands of computer network technicians with years of experience using software and understanding the risks of not backing up etc:
-People often forgot to upload their work at the end of the day, in some cases they didn’t update for weeks.
-Information was outdated (stale), the managers at the shop had no idea what was billable and what was still to be done because people were not uploading their completed work orders in a timely fashion.
-Because of people not uploading regularly, this resulted in work not getting billed as quickly as it should have been, a real no no in the service industry.
-A lot of information was lost on a regular basis because people would not upload in a timely fashion, their notebook computer would crash, (in one case was stolen with weeks ofunsaved work on it),or they would overwrite the files etc.
-Dispatchers would edit the work orders at the shop copy on the network, not realizing people had taken a copy already, they would add additional work items, the person would come back and upload and overwrite it and the shop entered additional information would be lost.
-Sometimes dispatchers would cancel an item, delete the work order, the person who had taken it was unaware and would go to the site to perform the service only to learn they weren’t needed there, then they would upload the work order rather than deleting it on their offline copy, the whole cycle would begin again.
-Because information was stale, a technician doing a follow up service call didn’t have the benefit of viewing the work done previously and in some cases had no idea that another tech had been there to do some work just recently.
I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that a bullet proof and highly convoluted system needs to be put in place before such a system doesn’t turn out to be a nightmare in practice. The issues aren’t technical ones, they are human error ones.
To work, an offline systemwould require a check in / Check out type of system where the work order or item could be checked out for each user, locked at the office, maybe a time frame added for people to have to check it back in before an alarm goes off alerting the manager of missing workorders etc etc. Some sort of system to account for changes to work orders after the technician has already downloaded their work for the day to their notebook computer.
Basically a lot of work to protect users from themselves is what it would come down to in the end. People issues when it comes down to it not software issues, but it’s irrelevant to the user when their data is lost that the software didn’t protect them from loss. In the case of offline work orders there’s very little that we have control of in that situation and it puts us in an awkward place.
With the current online system it’s pretty hard to lose any information; with an offline system it’s easy to lose