New Dispatch View Suggestion

[FunctionOne]

Right now Dispatch lists hours along the vertical and employees along the horiztonal column. This limitation only allows for single day view.

I would like to recommend a week view that could show the days across the horizontal and employee names along the vertical. At each intersection would be a square representing the appointments for that users day. You would not have the full chronology of the day as there would not be enough room to represent all of the hours but you could see maybe 2-3 entries including start and stop times.

THis would be a nice default view for dispatch so we can see the entire week at a glance and see immediately who has a "hole" or availabilty to take on a new appointment or task without having to jump around one day at a time.

The current week view shows hours on the horizontal which isn't as convenient as we cannot quickly see who is available.

[Support Team]

Hi FunctionOne - Thanks for your constructive and detailed feedback and ideas. The current design of the Dispatcher window has many benefits as it provides a very clear daily view of the activity and allows efficient dispatching by clearly viewing the chronological activity per day for all employees at once. It makes it very easy to find "holes" in the schedule and assign the most efficient work load per employee.

You can also set each appointment with its own color, which can be used for different purposes. For example, if you decide to use the colors as a "color code per employee" then you can do this when creating the new appointment. You can also use the color coding to represent urgency, or any other parameter you wish to display clearly.

A weekly view is currently available in the calendar which displays all of the listed employees' appointments in a single screen. You can see all of the appointments in the same window, and in case you have some kind of color-coding per employee, it is very easy to have a quick-glance on the week's activity for all employees at once, and see who is most available.

Adding an option which will allow a full weekly view for dispatching all employees on the same screen has its benefits, however, as you mentioned, it has its faults, as it shows only the appointments themselves, and not the full chronology.

You can use the current weekly view for a quick glance of the work load for the week, and we may add a weekly-dispatcher view in the future. Note that this will not replace the daily dispatching view, which is the most convenient and efficient way to dispatch. Also note that you can easily change the day viewed by clicking the day in the calendar on the right-side of the window.

Sherry

[Blue Ridge Technologies]

It would be nice if we could the dispatch tickets list on the weekly screen. Also, have tasks show on the dispatch calander window.

[FunctionOne]

Hi Sherry,

I agree the daily view is useful - but honestly - a weekly view would be even more useful. We don't work in one day bubbles - we are constantly planning out one to three weeks in advance and being able to see the entire week - with all employees - at a glance would be much more efficient than clicking around on 15 work days to find one that works.

Also - seeing these days as a week allows us to see them in context of other projects and events which is not possible in a single day view.

We seriously need this week view with all employees listed.

[cjezell]

We always schedule out several weeks in advance also. Personally I would love to have a monthly view available to me. Being extrememly project driven, a monthly view would make my life much easier

[Support Team]

Hi cjezell,

Thanks for adding your input on this. A monthly view in the dispatcher calendar is an interesting suggestion, and I can see how this can be helpful for project management, by seeing all your resources availability in a glance. I added your notes to the calendar views feature request, to be evaluated when we get to implementing this.

At the moment, you may find the current weekly view helpful, which shows all employees in a single view on the weekly calendar. When using colors for appointments, this can be even more helpful, in order to get a quick glance of the activity for the week.

Sherry

[FunctionOne]

I know we need to be careful about outright copying other PSA tools on the market - but the feature I originally discussed in here - or rather, the alternative dispatch view - is already existing in your other competitors - namely Connectwise and Autotask. So I don't see this being an issue for CommitCRM to also add this view.

To drive home my point and assist in ensuring the visual concept is clear I'm posting a link to Connectwise weekly layout. To be clear - this is not a 'My Schedule' view which is more or less what CommitCRM offers now. A chance to view each employees personal schedule for the week - but it's inefficient as we must do it one at a time.

The Dispatch view defaults to a daily view where we can see each employees schedule - but only for a single day - again, this is very inefficient when trying to schedule anything in advance. Especially when scheduling projects alongside regular onsite visits - it become critical to have a view of the activity during the days before and after a scheduled appointment.

This weekly view allows us to see what each employees current week looks like day by day. We can easily spot holes at a glance and can better understand which employees are being utilized efficiently.
http://www.connectwise.com/images/screenshots/Scheduling/DispatchPortal_B.png

They and AutoTask have both gone an extra step to color-code the days - Red indicates a low booking - meaning we're not making any money there as there is currently no billable hours for that employee. Yellow indicates a lightly assigned day while green indicates a full load.

As you can see - this is already very close to what CommitCRM has developed - we just need to go the extra step of adding the employees alongside the vertical column.

This also helps for expansion from a UI perspective. You don't want to force users to side-scroll through an application. This isn't Excel. We want them to easily be able to scroll up and down - an activity their mouse is designed for - to view all of their growing list of employees and their respective schedules.

I hope this post makes the argument for this feature a bit more clear.

[Support Team]

Hey FunctionOne, we hear you loud and clear.

We're here, and we're listening, and we're working away on all sorts of stuff. This item is on our radar and I've added your ideas to the feature request. Thanks for the input.

Dina

[FunctionOne]

I know you guys are Dina :) Just seeing that this conversation thread has taken a few deviations and wanted to make sure it went back on course ;)

[maxtowns]

+1 (but PLEASE don't start going on about 'painting things green' (aka CW...) ;)