ServiceDesk 4.8.169 Update 07/05/20

In March 23 (see here) we introduced hyper-intelligent route-sequence optimization via GraphHopper. In April 5 (see here) we added a significant enhancement.

All of this was in regard to mechanisms optimize the sequence of appointments you have already assigned to a technician, on basis of your own judgment and consideration. Regardless, it was also work that anticipated a much grander scope, of things to come. Specifically, it contemplated having Artificial Intelligence (AI) figure out for you what is the most optimum distribution, of jobs that you've scheduled to be done in a particular day, among the techs that you will have working in that day.

This latter is obviously a much more ambitious task, than when AI is involved merely in figuring out the optimum sequence of such jobs as are already assigned to a particular tech.

Regardless of how ambitious, we now offer precisely this AI.

Yes, it's true, we do!

In a nutshell, ServiceDesk can take your entire roster of appointments for a given day, and take your entire roster of available techs for that same day. It can submit the whole problem to GraphHopper's AI, which then deduces what's most optimum in regard to which techs do which jobs and in what sequence.

Yes, it does account for jobs that are already "Definite-status" assigned to particular techs.

Yes, it does account for jobs that already have particular times or time-frames scheduled.

Yes, it does account for each tech's start and end times, even break times and special-inserted "Unvlbl" times.

Yes, it does account for each tech's starting and ending locations.

The one element it does not yet account for is if only some of your techs have some particular skills and if particular jobs require those skills. That is the final piece in the puzzle that we're still working on. If you have that dynamic in your operation, you'll need to wait for our completion of this last element. If you do not have that dynamic, whole-roster optimization is ready for you now.

Please see details here.

From time to time users want to have password protection on actions for which a prior password protection category did not exist. We tend to add these in bunches, including now. Here are seven new ones:

When in the F7 Current-JobRecord form you click manually to indicate that a job is complete, the system does a number of behind-the-scenes checks to assure there are no loose ends that, perhaps, you should be considering. One of these checks has been to see if any parts are on order, and to warn if so.

It turns out that, logically, we should have have a similar warning if parts had been ordered and received on the job, but with no disposition (i.e., usage or otherwise) indicated. That's been added now, and will produce a message similar to this if apt:

As an aside, it's logical that this same warning should be added if you're closing out a job by making a SalesJournal entry. Please look for that in another update.