Scheduling - the simplest way

This video explains the simplest way to schedule a job with in TeamPoint

Prefer reading? Transcript of the video below

In this video we're going to look at the simplest way of scheduling a job within Teampoint. By scheduling

what we mean is assigning one of our field workers onto the job at a particular date and time so that they can go and complete the work.

Within Teampoint there are lots of different ways of scheduling works, depending on the type of scheduling that you're doing. You may be doing planned scheduling, scheduling a week in advance or a month in advance. You might be doing a larger batch of jobs in which case you probably use our calendar scheduling tool or one of our map scheduling tools. You might be doing reactive scheduling where you've had an urgent job that you need to fit into the schedule very quickly. You might need to shuffle other things around, again we would probably use a map based scheduling tool for that or maybe the diary scheduler. However the simplest and easiest way of scheduling a job is to just click into it and assign an operative,if we know who's going and when they're going.

That's what we're going to look at today. This is simple scheduling.

The first thing we need to do is to find a job that needs to be scheduled. The best way to do that will be to look on our operations dashboard. We could also look, this is the Teampoint homepage, we could look in the jobs section here, which tells us about unscheduled works during the next 14 days, for instance so we might just click here, which would give us the 34 jobs which need scheduling. But for a bit more detail we're going to look on our operations dashboard.

We go to operations on the main menu and dashboard, this is our operations dashboard. This page gives us lots of information about all of the operational issues that we need to attend to at any current moment. There's a section at the top about jobs, there are many other details as we go down the dashboard. This dashboard will be reviewed in another video. For now I'm just trying to find a job to schedule. If I look at my reactive jobs over here, I've got 10 overdue reactive jobs at an entered status. Entered means it's ready to be scheduled so let's click on there and we'll go and schedule one of those jobs.

We have 10 entered overdue reactive jobs, I'll click on here, this is our list of jobs which need to be scheduled. I'm just going to choose the one at the top. If we have a look at this job we've got a due date here, this is due by the end of the day on the 11th of June, which is why it's gone overdue.

This is the job status here which is entered. We're just going to click into the job and schedule it through the job card. So click on the job this opens our job details up for us and to go to schedule the job we go to the scheduling tab. This is where I'm gonna click on scheduling.

There are few different sections to this page, the top section allows us to add days on to the job. These are the days that we're going to complete works on. For instance if we just need one day for this job we might choose the Monday and add days. This has now added Monday to our job which means that we can allocate people on this day. Below the day are the people that can be allocated to the job. These are field workers down here on the left hand side. By default, Teampoint will match your workers to your jobs based on the tags that both your workers and your jobs have. If we have a quick look at this job you can see we've got the carpentry tag ticked which means it's a carpentry job. If we go back to scheduling these are operatives that have the carpentry tag ticked on their profiles.

It's suggesting that we need to send one of these two guys because they're both carpenters. It might be that we choose to ignore the tags and we want to send somebody else, in which case we just untick the match job tags here. Then we can select any one of our operatives. But for now we'll keep the tags on so that we know that we're sending the person to the job who has the right skills to complete that job. If I want to send Jake on Monday all I do is put a tick over in this box here, that's now booked Jake onto the job on Monday the fifteenth. We can also optionally add a time to the booking. Let's say we want him on the job at 12 o'clock and we can also book a duration for how long we think it's going to take him to do the work, let's say 120 minutes. By adding this day ticking this box, putting the time and the duration in we've allocated Jake on to the job on Monday at 12:00 for two hours.

Now we can have as many different people on the job as we like for as many days as we like as well. We could also send Samuel to this job for instance. We might tick here and put Samuel on the job maybe the same time, maybe it's a different time, maybe he comes in afterward to do something else. Whatever we need let's just on tick him. We can also book as many days onto the job as we want.

Let's say Jake needs to do some work on Monday, Samuel needs to come in on Tuesday to do some follow up work. We'll put some more days onto the job, let's put Tuesday through to Friday onto the job. We can book Samuel onto this job now on Tuesday simply by clicking here we can give him a start time let's say that's 10 o'clock and we can give him a duration let's say it's 60 minutes. Now we have Jake going on Monday at 12 and we have Samuel going on Tuesday at 10. We can have any combinations we want here, we could have them both there all week if we wanted to, whatever we need. We can leave these ones blank if we don't need them. For now I'm just going to schedule these two guys on two days, one after the other at different times.

To save the schedule we have two options, which are, save and schedule or save and dispatch. The difference between schedule and dispatch is if a job is scheduled that means it's been planned so it will go into everybody's diaries in the office side of Teampoint everybody can see that these guys have been allocated at these times but it hasn't actually issued the jobs out to your field workers yet. If we click save and dispatch that will send the jobs out to Jake and Samuel, they'll be able to pick those up on their phones or on their tablets in the field, so that they can see that this work has been allocated to them for next week.

The reason why we might want to schedule, rather than dispatch is that we may just be planning the work and it might be that it's due to change and we're putting them in for a provisional date which may well change at some point in the future. What we don't want to do is confuse our field technicians by sending them scheduled jobs, which then get rescheduled and then they get them taken off them and then reissue back to them. So usually we wouldn't dispatch the job to our technicians until we're 100% confident that they're not going to change.

In a similar respect, we have this box here for confirmed with customer. If we've confirmed with the customer and we type in this box to say that we have confirmed the times and the dates with our customer, once this job is scheduled, it will actually lock the job. We can't change it unless we reconfirm with the customer afterward. Obviously if we've had an agreement from a customer that we're going to arrive on site at a particular date and time we don't want somebody else to come and change the scheduling date without confirming with the customer once more, so that they know of any changes that have happened.

We're gonna save and dispatch this one. Okay that takes us back to our list of jobs

we can see that we now have a scheduled date against our job which is over here so it's scheduled for the 15th. We can also see down here that Jake and Samuel have been allocated. That shows on our list here as well. We can see on our other jobs, we don't have people allocated to them. So this job now has been scheduled.

If we go back to our operations dashboard, we'll see that our overdue reactive jobs has gone down to nine now, from 10 and our overdue dispatched jobs have gone up to 7. Because that job is basically moved from here, over to here.

So that is the simplest way to schedule a job within Teampoint. You can schedule as many days as you need to, you can schedule as many operatives as you need to, Teampoint offers to match the skill sets and the skills required on the job to your operatives.

As I said at the start, there are many other ways of scheduling jobs and if you're scheduling large numbers of jobs there are much better ways but this is the simplest and easiest way of scheduling a job.

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