Best Work Flow for engineers

What is the best way from start to finish for engineers to work CommitCRM ?? we are having trouble finding the best way, this is what we currently do;

1. Customer brings pcs into workshop
2. Job is booked in as a ticket & customer given a job card.
3. Label Printed onto pc
4. Office staff allocated job to engineer using dispatcher
5. Engineer creates activity template called "diagnose"
6. Engineer marks "diagnose" task as complete with his diagnoses
7. Engineer selects an activity template on the job he thinks it is
8. Completes the job
9. sends message to office to say ready then prints resolution form
10. office calls customer & sends a txt message

How can we make this simple? Also is there anywhere to send a SMS when the job is complete automatically?

We are testing the 5.3 beta 2 version at the moment and I do say there are big improvements with the email part! which is great. But would like to tweak it to be bale to send SMS messages

Cheers for now

I've often thought the ability for CommitCRM to print a mini label onto label paper with the customer name, account and ticket # would be fab. Then theres no chance of mixing up pcs in the workshop.

yes you bet, we already do this with CommitCRM. I have a little Brother label printer. Every item that comes in gets a label.

anyone got any better ideas on workflow for repair process?

I don't use the alerts service myself. But I imagine you'd use an email to SBS gateway service. They would give you an email address like <mobile_number>@smsgateway.com. You could configure that as the email address on the account. The only thing is that CommitCRM wouldn't know that you are sending an SMS. I suppose you would have to create an email template and limit that to 160 characters.

i would like this built into the alerts server maybe use clikatel service to send the sms! Sms is the way forward these days!

pops, any chance you would post your activity templates for all to see?