Release FV2208 brings the concept of Resource Groups into FieldVu and their use in the Dispatch and Rental workflow, as well as a number of performance enhancements and bug fixes.
This release is currently in QA, and is scheduled to be pushed to Production on the evening of August 16th, 2022.
Up until now, FieldVu has handled Resource Types (Worker or Equipment) on an individual basis. That means that if a Job requires 10 Work Type and 10 Equipment Types to be scheduled, dispatched, and rented on a Job, each of those Resources needs to be handled on their own. This is fine if each Job requires different resources on it, but frequently there is the need to assign the same group of resources to multiple Jobs. In this case, there is the potential for significant time savings and a reduction in User error if they could treat those same resources as a single group.
Under the Setup section of the main navigation menu, there is now a Resource Groups option. This will open up the Resource Groups screen where the User can create new Groups, and edit or delete existing ones.
Within a specific Resource Group, the User then has the ability to “Add Equipment/Work Types” to the Group, or delete existing Resource Types. Also, if desired, specific Resources (Worker name or Equipment serial number) can be assigned to each of the Resource Types. This is useful if the same specific resources are always utilized together.
Now that Resource Groups have been created, the User can easily assign a large number of Resource Types to a specific Job on the Job / Schedule screen. With the new Group tab on the right of the screen, the User is able to simply drag the Group onto any Job Task, and all components of that Group will become assigned to that Job.
If needed, any individual components of a Group which may have already been assigned, can be deleted using the trash can icon as normal. This would be useful when most of the Resource Group is needed on a Job, but not all of it.
On the Dispatch screen, the components of a Resource Group are able to be handled individually, or as a complete Group. Each assignment is able to be Dispatched In/Out on their own, or the Resource Group checkbox can be used to select all component Resources of that Group which have a specific Resource assigned to it. If the Resource Group was defined with specific Workers or Equipment, those will be automatically populated on this screen.
And finally, on the Rental Billing screen we continue the ability to select individual assignments, or the Resource Group as a whole, to bill.
This concludes the process of being able to add a potentially large number of Resources to a Job with a single drag, Dispatch them all at the same time, and then easily bill for the rental of all components within that Group at once. For Users that frequently need to keep track of the same Resources being consistently rented on Jobs, this is going to save a lot of time and reduce the opportunity of errors creeping into the workflow.
