ServiceDesk 4.8.183 Update 09/14/20

For those of you on the appliance repair side (and with apologies to the rest of you), you're likely familiar with Service Company Solutions (aka "SCS"), the proprietors of The Blue Book, MyPartsHelp, MPH-Diagnostics and SCS Communications (among other offerings).

For years, we've partnered with SCS on a variety of integrations. In fact, the first was MyPartsHelp, a solution that allows you with a single click to see availability of a particular part from among all your vendors, and allows you to share parts availability information with other servicers (this, in turn, provides a potential source that you'd not otherwise have for NLA parts.

It so happens that SCS has dramatically improved its MyPartsHelp system. In fact, it's more than improvement. They've introduced an entire new generation of the service.

Somewhat unhappily, this imposed a new burden on Rossware, for we had to re-do our integration to make it work with this new generation.

Happily, regardless, we have completed our "re-do" work. There are two elements:

1. There is a second generation of our SD-MPH utility (now called "BB-Sync+").

If you did not know, this is a utility (similar to our DispatchLink utilities and our SD-MobileLink and SD-CyberLink) that, running in the background, automatically maintains updated information with another party. In this case, SD-MPH (now BB-Sync+) automatically maintains updated inventory information with SCS for use in the MPH Search system.

Our second generation of this utility has a new name, because, in addition to working with SCS's Gen II of MyPartsHelp, it also works with SCS Gen II of the Online BlueBook. That second generation adds a new feature whereby, from the Online BlueBook interface, your techs can directly see their inventory, and that of the rest of your inventory.

It's because of this new and very much expanded function that we've chosen a new name for our second-generation of this utility: BB-Sync+.

2. ServiceDesk is now poised to link you to SCS' new and improved Gen II online MPH Search interface.

In fact, ServiceDesk will make this switch automatically, once SCS has configured your account to use Gen II (until and unless that occurs, ServiceDesk will continue to link you to Gen I). Please contact SCS with request for them to make this change for you.

If you're curious, links to the MPH Search online inquiry are provided in several contexts, both within with ServiceDesk and SD-Mobile. If, for example, you're in the F8 PartsProcess interface, a simple Ctrl/Right-Click on a part number produces this set of options:

Just pick the first option, and you've triggered the magic link to SCS' MPH Search.

For some time, ServiceDesk has accommodated a maximum of 72 zones. That's a lot of zones. Most operations don't need nearly that many. Regardless, we recently encountered a client needing more. Now ServiceDesk will accommodate up to 120 zones.

When you have a larger quantity of zones, the vertically-oriented graph sections in the Shift-F5 ZoneScheduler interface (which are designed to graphically show comparative allocations and percent of capacity used, for each zone) become narrower (necessarily narrower, because you're more side-by-side into a limited horizontal space). Brian Chin (technical guru for the client that needed more than 72 zones) suggested an option to omit from the display any zones for which, in regard to the scheduling slot being shown, there happened to be zero allocations and zero burdens. It was a great idea, so the option is now there:

As a BTW (and if you did not happen to already know), the ZoneScheduler interface will automatically expand to take advantage of whatever is the width that ServiceDesk itself is set for. Thus, if you have expanded ServiceDesk to fill your entire screen, the ZoneScheduler interface will, when displayed, likewise expand to take advantage of that width.

One of the things that happens with the Address Verification feature (as introduced last year, see here) is that ServiceDesk checks for and compares to the DispatchMap coordinates (if any) that are presently in a Callsheet or JobRecord. If they do not check out as being correct, ServiceDesk so informs, and offers to change to match what is indicated on basis of such lat/lon info as was returned as part of the verification.

We realized we'd left something out.

Specifically, if the verification has been performed on a JobRecord, and if that JobRecord has one or more pending appointments, it follows that, logically, you'd want to have any correct DispatchMap coordinate corrected in those pending appointments, as well.

More recently, in conjunction with GraphHopper-based whole-roster optimization and an option therein to make the optimization solution honor tech-to-zone associations (see here), we discovered while troubleshooting in some users' systems that many jobs had erroneous zone assignments. Based on this, we added another behind-the-scenes function whereby address verification likewise looks to see what zone a job should be assigned to. Much as looking to assure any present DispatchMap coordinate is correct, if it finds the zone assignment is not correct, it likewise informs and offers to correct (neither of these improvements were actually announced at the time; we just quietly made them).

Anyway, this one too left out the compelling need to likewise update any pending appointment entries, and was simply updating the JobRecord, where applicable.

Both these oversights are addressed in the current release.