Dispatching, which reside within the "People & Equipment" module when enabled, allows companies to easily schedule resources (employees and equipment) one week into the future. This article will go over the Setup of Crews (not required) and how to use the Dispatching Module. 

 

 

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Setting Up Crews

It is important to note that this step is not required. Dispatching will work by individual resource. These additional features allow a bit of set up time to hopefully make the dispatching process much more efficient from a long term standpoint. 

 

1. Navigate to the Organization section and into the People option. 

2. Find a person that is a crew lead. Edit their record and navigate to the "Employee Info" tab. To note this employee as a crew lead, toggle the "Is Crew Lead" option to "ON". When this happens, the "Assigned Crew Lead" will fill in with the employee's own name and become read only. Now we can add other employees to this employee's crew. 

 

 

3. Navigate to another employee's record who is on this crew lead's crew. Change the "Assigned Crew Lead" drop down to show the previously created crew lead's name.

 

 

4. This is important because now, within the actual Dispatching tool, crews can be dispatched efficiently by filtering for the crew lead's name. 

 

 

5. Now let us set up a piece of equipment. To do this, within the "People & Equipment" area, navigate to the "Equipment" tab and select a piece of equipment that is related to the crew lead previously set up.  Note, this is not required at all, but can make dispatching more efficient.

 

6. Navigate to the "Assignment Info" tab. Most likely, the "Assigned Employee", "Assigned Project", and "Assigned Crew Lead" are blank. Fill those in as needed with these notes:

 

• The Assigned Employee and Assigned Crew Lead do not have to be the same person. The Assigned Employee could be a person within the crew. 
• If the piece of equipment has an Assigned Employee, then the Assigned Project will fill in automatically based on that Employee's assigned project. 

 

 

 

7. How does this affect Dispatching? Again, if we navigate to Dispatching and filter by the crew lead's name, we can now see the piece of equipment within the crew. Additionally, because we assigned the piece of equipment to an employee, that piece of equipment shows right under the employee's name. 

 

 

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Dispatching Tool

 

1. The dispatching tool brings in all active employees and equipment for the selected company. 

2. Users with access to the dispatching tool will be able to search by employee/equipment name, id number, and if used, the crew lead. 

3. In the screenshot below, notice that the first day shown on the dispatching grid will be the current day. The next working day (tomorrow or the next day after non-working days) will default to today's project UNLESS that resource had been previously scheduled to go to a different project on that day. 

 

 

4. To start dispatching, select one or more cell. For this example, we will move the crew created in the previous article to a new job. A couple of notes here:

 

• Linked equipment cannot be selected as it will follow the employee to whom it is linked.
• Multiple cells can be selected. 
• Non-working days can be selected as well but values will NOT default into non-working days. 

 

Once the cells are selected, a side panel will appear where the project can be selected and notes can be entered. Notifications will be sent at the scheduled time the night before the dispatched date. The scheduled time is set within the Company Configuration. Once the user hits "Dispatch", this dispatch is put into the processing queue. 

 

 

 

 

5. What happens if I need to send a resource to another location on the current date? Again, navigate to the dispatching tool and find the employee(s). As long as the dispatch happens on ONLY the current date, the user will have the choice to send the notification immediately instead of per the notification schedule. 

 

 

Important Notes:

 

1. When an employee is dispatched to a Project, they will become an "active employee" on that specific Project Roster. They will become inactive on the Project Roster for the prioject they were on previously. To see how this affects timecards, review the article regarding Company Versus Project Roster.