A critical step in the life-cycle of a work order is assigning it to a technician for completion. BlueFolder has robust assignment capabilities that accommodate both simple jobs and complex projects.
To assign a work order in BlueFolder, you must create an "assignment" that links the work order to one or more technicians. To create an assignment, click the Assign (
) link in the right-hand column of the work order list or the link in the right-hand sidebar while viewing a work order. An assignment can be "unscheduled", or could include a date and time when the assignment is to be completed. An assignment may also include an "assignment comment" which is useful for identifying information that the assigned technician(s) needs in order to complete the assignment.
Assignment Types
There are two basic assignment types in BlueFolder:
- Scheduled Assignment - an assignment that is to be completed at a specific date and time. In most cases, the scheduled date and time has been confirmed with a customer and is when the customer expects the technician to arrive at the site to complete the work.
- Unscheduled Assignment - an assignment that can be completed at the technicians discretion and does not require completion at a specific date and time. This type of assignment is useful when the customer is not required to be present during completion of the work, or if the work is being performed remotely.
Multiple Assignments and Multiple Assignees
An assignment can have one assignee or multiple assignees. The most common scenario is a single assignee, but sometimes a job requires a small team to complete. To assign multiple technicians to the same assignment, simply add additional assignees to the list of assignees when creating or editing the assignment. Each assignee will receive email/text notifications based on their personal notification preferences. When the time comes to complete an assignment, any one of the assigned technicians can mark the assignment as complete (i.e. completion is not tracked for each technician but is tracked at the assignment level itself).
You can also create multiple assignments for a single work order. This is useful for scenarios where a technician needs to perform work on multiple days, or for a follow-up appointment, or even for scenarios where you want to assign multiple technicians to the same work order but want to track their assignment completion individually. BlueFolder's ability to have multiple assignments and multiple assignees per assignment provides a lot of flexibility for managing jobs both large and small.
Completing Assignments
When a technician completes the work associated with their assignment on a work order, he/she should mark the assignment as "Complete". Doing so makes it clear to co-workers that the assigned work is complete. Completing assignments is also useful to the technician as it removes the completed assignments from their list of active assignments.
To complete an assignment, click the checkbox button next to the assignment. In the Complete Assignment window that appears, you may enter a comment associated with the assignment completion. You may also choose to set the work order's status to a new value at the same time. In fact, in the work order settings (found in Settings > General Settings > Work Orders) you can specify the default status value you want to change to when completing an assignment. In addition to adding a comment and changing the status while completing an assignment, you can also record billable (or non-billable) labor at the same time. To do so, click the Add Labor Item link in the Complete Assignment window and then fill in the fields associated with the labor item details.
When an assignment is marked as complete, a log entry is added to the work order to record the completion. The assignment itself will also display who completed it and when it was completed.
If a work order is closed (by changing it's status to "Closed") any incomplete assignments associated with the work order will automatically be marked as complete.