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dispatching techniciansDispatching Techs by Swipe and Touch

Our latest update solves one problem when sorting vehicles on the Today’s Vehicle Page (TVP) and adds two new highly effective techniques to the Service Advisor toolbox. The new rules to the TVP are:

  1. The sorting filter is now reduced to “Promised Date” and “RO Number“.
  2. In addition Drag ‘n Drop applies. The moment any vehicle is moved by Drag ‘n Drop, the whole screen will be ‘frozen’. All new vehicles will then be added at the end of the right column. The service advisor will be given a number next to the tech name or workflow step (“3” in the image on the left) to know how many invisible vehicles are in that column.

In other words, the service advisor has now full control over each individual vehicle and can just drag ‘n drop with mouse or finger. No vehicle is left in the dark. If the service advisor wants to reset the drag n dropsorting order, they just switch from “Drag ‘n Drop” to “Promised Date” or “RO Number”.

The frozen status or the sorting filter applies to all TVP screens open at any given time, no matter whether the shop owner is looking at it on his own screen or a service advisor filter is used. This way all changes to the screen will be shop wide. Please use this feature with caution and don’t confuse other staff members by too many changes.

Lets look at a few examples:

10 vehicles

The image on the leftdispatch technicians
shows 6 visible vehicles in “Waiting for Drop Off” with the Invisible Vehicle Index (IVI) of 4. The total number of vehicles in “Waiting for Drop Off” is 10. The other column shows 22 (16+6) vehicles in “Waiting for Inspect” respectively. In order to see the 4 invisible vehicles in “Waiting for Drop Off”, the service advisor can either scroll down or just select “Waiting for Drop Off” for the second column. The use of the second-column-method is shown on the right. All vehicles are visible in the order shown on the image indicated by the red arrow.
Simple, isn’t it?

There is nothing touchy about a touch screen

Now lets take a look at dispatching techs through finger swipe and drag ‘n drop. And lets assume you have a high influx of vehicles in a very short time in the morning when motorists drop of their vehicles and technicians need to be assigned to those vehicles fast.

Today you write up the work order and need to assign the technicians based on their availability. How do you know their availability? Uh…, hm…., &^%(*@ – you have no idea using your current POS software. So you have to use sloooowwww methods like a white board, an online calendar, a piece of paper or… you just give up dispatching and let the technicians grab their first vehicle. Right? Right.
But aren’t you looking for a method to control the situation and do it fast?

SmartFlow gets you there. In fact, is has become super easy.

Don’t write up the technician anymore in your Point of Sale (POS). Just don’t. Instead….
All vehicles show up in the  “No Tech” column on your Techview page on SmartFlow. With one glance you see what tech is available and how many hours are already assigned to them. Now you drag the vehicle with mouse or finger from the “No Tech” column to the right tech column. In case there are more than one tech needed for this vehicle you are being asked to either confirm that all jobs on the work order go to the one tech selected or you select individual jobs and assign them to other techs with two clicks/touches. Immediately you can see the load for the techs at the top of the tech column and avoid overload. Done.

Check the images sequence below, which illustrates the process described above (click on the individual images to see more details). When dragging the vehicle to the technician the default technician will be set to that technician. You just need to confirm by closing the pop up window or select other technicians for the listed jobs.

move the vehicle to marvinconfirm and select new techsvehicle is assigned

 

 

Note that the 4.2 billed hours are immediately visible at the top of Marvin’s column. This drag ‘n drop action takes not more than 3 seconds.

 

How about re-assigning technicians during the work day?

No problem. It works the same way: Drag ‘n drop the vehicle from one tech to the other. There is one difference: Although the default technician is altered by drag ‘n drop based on your request, no job is re-assigned yet. You need to do that manually by pressing the button “Assign all unfinished jobs to [name of default tech]” and by selecting individual techs for each job on the list, if applicable.