In this video we're going to be looking at how to use the calendar based scheduling tool within Teampoint.

There are lots of different ways of scheduling within TeamPoint. The calendar based scheduler is probably best used for forward planning. Maybe you're trying to work out your schedule for the next week or the next month or next six weeks. The Calendar scheduling tool is probably better for that kind of scheduling.

If you were doing reactive scheduling where you've just got a single job that you need to fit in urgently you might use one of our reactive scheduling tools. You may choose to schedule via the map so there are lots of different ways of going about scheduling.

The calendar is just one of the tools within Teampoint that helps you to do that and we're gonna have a look at how that works just now.

To find the calendar scheduling tool, we go to our main menu on the left hand side, we go to operationss and scheduling, clicking here. We're presented with some options of what we want to see on our schedule. The first section is the dates that we want to see, so it's asking us do we wanna see one day or three days or a week or a month. We can configure the time scale that we want to look at. In here we're just going to look at next week, we're going to look from Sunday through to the following Sunday. That's going to give us eight days on a schedule. So that's the scheduled date section. The next section is jobs, so this is allowing us to decide which unplanned jobs that we want to see.

The whole point of the schedule is we're taking unplanned work and we're planning it. We're allocating it to our technicians. We need to decide which unplanned jobs we want to see because if we have hundreds or possibly even thousands of unplanned jobs, we probably only want to see a smaller subsection of those. It might be that we want to see a specific job type, it might be that we want to see jobs which are only due within a certain range, between from and two dates. It might be that we want to look at jobs only in a particular geographic area, so by postcode. Unless we only have a very small number of unscheduled jobs we probably want to see a subset of the jobs so that we can plan those more easily.

In the same way with our operatives, if we've got three or four or five operatives fine, we can look at them all on one schedule but if we've got 100 operatives or 150 operatives we probably wanna break those down into teams or into skill sets so that we can plan them in smaller groups which are a little bit easier to manage.

To begin with we'll select our jobs, so we're gonna say we want all of the jobs which are due up to the 28th, because this matches our end date here, so anything which is due after the 28th we're not gonna worry about for the time being. Then we're gonna choose a job type, we can either choose the subtype here which would be reactive, recall, quoted works, but we're gonna go for the main job type here. These are all configurable within TeamPoint, you can have whatever you want in here. We're going to pick planned maintenance for our job type, so it's only going to bring me planned maintenance work. It's not going to give me reactive maintenance, not going to give me subcontractor work, it's not going to give me general small works. It's just going to give me this subset of my jobs.

In the same way I'm going to choose my maintenance team. I think in this demo system, we might have 80 technicians, they're broken down into teams. We've got a drainage team, a maintenance team, a project's team and a reactive team. I'm only looking at planning the maintenance team for now. If we wanted to go further on this we can choose tags also and we can choose skill sets. sIt might be I only want to know about operatives with the drainage skill for instance. But we're not going to do that for now, we're just going to look at the maintenance team. We're going to look at planned maintenance jobs.

Now we've got everything configured we'll load our schedule, so I'm gonna click here and this brings our schedule up in a new window.

The window is broken into two main sections, we have the top section here with unplanned work and if I just scroll that down we can see we've loaded quite a lot of jobs into here. This top section is also broken into two, we've got a left hand side and right hand side. The left hand side has jobs the right hand side has site surveys. We don't have any site surveys in this example so that section is empty. This is all of our unplanned work, and the idea is it that we want to plan it all.

The lower section shows us our operatives. Each operative has their own row, this is Christopher, we can see the skills and training that that operative has and as we scroll up we can we go through all of the operatives in our team. I think we've got five possibly six guys in this team. We can see the jobs that they've been allocated already so David for instance has got a pretty full week stacked up this week already. We're probably not gonna be doing much scheduling for him.

We can also see holidays, Christopher for instance is on holiday Wednesday Thursday and Friday of this week. Holidays are all set up in the background and they get pulled through into the schedule so that we can see who's available and who's not.

Each one of these is collapsible to make things a little bit easier to see what's happening. We can close all of our operatives down like this and this just now gives us a top level view. If we were to look at Christopher we can see he's got no work allocated at all on any of these days. If we look at David he's got nine hours here eight hours here, eight hours here, six hours here so he's got a pretty full week.

Anything that goes over eight hours comes up in red as well to show that we might have given a little bit too much work. Let's have a look at Christopher, he doesn't have any work on Monday or Tuesday or Sunday for that matter, but not sure whether we want to give him work on Sunday. So let's find some jobs, the easiest way to give him a job is to literally drag it from the top onto his schedule there we go. We've given him three jobs now on Tuesday and we can see that's that comes to 45 minutes of work. We can also use this button here to calculate the travel times, so although we've given him 45 minutes of work there's actually eight and a half hours driving in between those jobs so they they're probably not very good jobs to give him really. This is gone red because he's got too much on really for one day. Obviously we wouldn't have chosen these jobs he's got to drive three and a half hours from home to get to that one and then he's got another four hour drive to get to the next one. We wouldn't have chosen those particular jobs. There are a lot of jobs at the top here, which sometimes can be quite difficult to to manage so what we probably want to do is break these down. We might want to break them down by customer, we might want to break them down by postcode. There's lots of different ways we can do that. If we go to our filters and I type WV in here for instance then what that's giving me is all of the jobs with the WV postcode. This is probably gonna make more sense, if we allocate these jobs to Monday for him for instance let me just bring them all through here. The reason these jobs have gone red is because they match the filter. Wen we filter jobs it hides the ones at the top and any that are on the schedule already they show up in red. When I clear the filter in a second you'll see that they they don't go red. Now I've scheduled Wolverhampton, let me go and remove my filter, these jobs have all come back these are no longer red. So we've still got nine hours of work because we've got quite a lot of jobs here, this one's a four hour job for instance. We might have given him too much work. If we work out the travel however, we're probably okay, we've got half an hour travel now which is much better. This is starting to look a little bit more like a sensible day.

So basically what we've done is we've looked at our unscheduled jobs in the top here, we've looked at our operatives we've we found jobs that that make sense to be done together and we just drag them onto the operative and that allocates the job to the operative.

This is a planning tool, so to begin with the jobs will go through as scheduled, the status of the job is scheduled, rather than dispatched. The difference between scheduled and dispatched - scheduled means we've planned it for a person at a date and a time, whereas dispatched means we actually issue that out to our field worker's PDA. They would receive those jobs. When we're planning, we probably don't wanna issue them straight away, because we might want to move them. I might look at this and go okay well he's got almost 10 hours worth of work there so you know what I'm gonna move this one and I'm just gonna drag it over here instead. What we wouldn't want to do is to issue that job to him on the Monday for instance, then decide that we want to re-plan it for the Wednesday or the Tuesday and then have that keep sending him notifications and job allocations. So the jobs initially when you drag them onto the schedule are scheduled. Once we're happy that everything's perfect and we've done an initial sweep and we've dragged all the jobs across and then maybe we've moved things around a little bit then we can click the tick up here and this dispatches that job out to a field worker. We can also do the ticks up here which will dispatch all jobs on the schedule to our field workers. That signs off the whole schedule.

So we've scheduled some work for Christopher, sorryI clicked on Christopher's name then which takes you over here to a calendar view for Christopher we can see everything that's booked in for him on a month by month basis. We don't have anything for August there, we've got some historical things as well.

Let's come back to the schedule. What I meant to do is to collapse him rather than click on his name. So, we've now scheduled Monday and Tuesday for Christopher we know he's on holiday Wednesday Thursday and Friday. We could give some work to Duncan for instance let's open that one up. We might want to look for a specific customer for instance if I type Mitchell in my filter I can see I've got these 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 jobs for Mitchell. Let's schedule those ones in, because maybe Mitchell's an important customer for me. Let's drop those in these are all in BN7, they might even all be at the same site. We'll put all those on one day, let's stick that one down there and we'll put all of these in, that one is in Sheffield. I'll just clear my filter, there we go so now we've scheduled a postcode and we've also scheduled a customer. We're starting to build up all of the work that we want our technicians to do. We would repeat this process until all of our jobs have been allocated one way or another.

That's how to use the calendar based schedule within Teampoint. Initially we choose what we want to see, so we want to see our dates for our schedule we want to choose which jobs we need to plan and we want to choose which operatives we want to plan. We then get into the schedule, we drag our unplanned jobs onto our technicians and we keep going until we've planned all of our jobs. We can filter our jobs, we can filter our technicians, we can view, our technicians diaries from here as well. We can look at postcodes we can look at customer names, so there's lots of different ways of managing the work.