Scheduling

Scheduling is the process by which production managers schedule visits to perform work identified based on work tickets to select crews on specific days. Scheduling of work to crews is performed on the Scheduling Board. Crews are identified by routes.

Scheduling Concepts

Visits

When work tickets are placed on the scheduling board, visits are created and represented by tiles . Visits can also be scheduled from the Work Ticket screen. Aspire allows you to schedule multiple visits for a single work ticket.

• Multi-day – For work tickets requiring many hours of work, the work might span multiple days. In these cases, Aspire allows you to create multiple visits for the same work ticket and place them on the days when the work will be done.
• Multi-crew – An additional way to handle work tickets requiring many hours of work is to create visits for routes on the same day, or days.

Aspire allows schedulers to mass-create visits on the Scheduling Board through recurring Schedules.

Aspire also allows crew leaders to log time to work tickets that have not been scheduled by:

• Initiating Quick Tickets
• Creating As Needed Tickets
• Selecting a contract service for a property assigned to their route

When a crew leader initiates non-scheduled services in one of these scenarios, Aspire automatically generates a visit and makes it visible on the Scheduling Board screen.

Visit Notes

Aspire provides the ability to create notes for a visit from Crew Mobile or from the Aspire desktop. These notes provide a channel of communication between crew members and office staff. 

These visit-level notes can then be accessed in the following locations:

1. Aspire Desktop
   1. Visit screen – Adding and viewing notes
   2. Work Ticket screen in the Notes section on the Visit Notes tab – Viewing only
   3. Opportunity screen– Viewing only
   4. Property screen from the Visit Notes option in the Reports menu – Viewing only
2. Crew Mobile from the Visit Notes button on the Work Ticket screen – Viewing and adding

If visits are deleted in Aspire, any associated visit notes are also deleted.

Sequence Numbers

When you schedules multiple visits for a given route on the same day, each visit is assigned a sequence number. The sequence numbers for those visits determine the order in which the visit tiles appear on that day and route. When you changes the order of tiles on the scheduling board by moving them around with the mouse, Aspire renumbers the sequence numbers to enforce the specified order.

you can visibly see or directly set the sequence number by drilling into a visit as shown here:

Routes

A route represents a series of visits that a crew will make over time. Most commonly, the crew will service the route in a single truck. A crew may consist of one crew member or several. One person in the crew will always be designated as a crew leader.

Routes are defined in Admin on the Route screen. Visits are scheduled to routes on the further defining the route for specific weeks.

Route Naming

Aspire requires that you name the routes for purposes of scheduling. There are multiple ways that companies choose to name their routes based on one or combinations of the following elements:

• Crew leader name
• Geography (i.e. town name, direction, etc.)
• Truck identifier (i.e. number or name)
• Division (maintenance, enhancements, irrigation, snow, etc.)
• General service performed (i.e. “Mow Crew 1”)

you should choose a standard nomenclature on which to base the names of all the routes. Examples of route names might be, “Maint North – John”, “Enhance South – Ed”, etc.

Route Types

It can be useful to consider the nature of different kinds of routes. These route types are not specifically identified in Aspire unless you choose to use them as part of the definition of the route names.

• Maintenance Routes – Crews on maintenance routes typically perform recurring contract work that happens at regular intervals like mowing, trimming, or scheduled site maintenance. It is typical for these types of routes to be based on recurring schedules that are established over the course of a season. These routes tend to have visits scheduled for many properties each day.
• Enhancement Routes – Crews on enhancement routes typically perform one-time work based on work orders. The jobs that they perform can be quick, a few hours, or may last for many days over a period of days, weeks, or months.
• Snow Routes – Crews on snow routes may consist of one person (plowing) or multiple crew members (sidewalk shoveling). Aspire provides special advanced setup features to help manage snow routes (pre-defined crews, fixed routes, identified services) more efficiently. These special features that you can set up in advance of snow season are managed on the Crew, Property, and Services tab of the Route screen.

Recurring Schedules

recurring services are supported for contract opportunities. When a contract with recurring services is won, Aspire generates a ticket for each service occurrence. Based on pre-defined service schedules for each service in the service catalog, Aspire sets the anticipated start date and schedule date for each generated work ticket to the first day of the month in which the ticket is likely to be scheduled. If a pre-defined service schedule has not been established on the service for the specified number of occurrences of the service in the opportunity, Aspire sets the anticipated start date and the scheduled date for each work ticket to the first day of the contract year. Notice that at this point, the visits have not yet been created – the status of the work tickets is set to Open (not Scheduled), and they will not yet appear on the Schedule Board.

Aspire provides a scheduler (Edit recurring Schedule option) that allows you to mass-schedule work ticket visits for a contract opportunity.

The following diagram shows the basic workflow for establishing a recurring schedule based on a visit that has been placed on the Scheduling Board screen:

Types of recurring Schedules

Aspire provides great flexibility in allowing you to specify the frequency and pattern of recurring visits when using the scheduler to generate recurring schedules. There are three types of recurring schedules from which you can choose on the Job Service Schedule screen:

• Days Between – Based on allowing you to specify a specific number of days between each visit.
• Weekly – Based on scheduling one visit per week.
• Monthly – Based on scheduling one visit per month.

After picking the general schedule type, you can adjust the schedule parameters to establish a more specific recurring schedule they desire.

Reoccurrence and Multi-Visit Work Tickets

Aspire allows you to create multiple visits per work ticket. The reoccurrence feature allows you to establish patterns of reoccurrence wherein a single crew requires more than one visit to complete the work for each work ticket.

Consider the example of a two-man crew that performs 30 hours of site maintenance work each week – fifteen hours on Mondays and another fifteen hours on Tuesdays. This could be established as a recurring schedule with two visits each week.

Scheduling Recurring Visits

Work tickets generated for a contract opportunity when it is won become available for scheduling on the Scheduling Board screen. The Scheduling Board screen provides features that allow you to mass-schedule all work tickets for an opportunity based on its recurring schedule. The steps for establishing a recurring schedule are:

1. Place the first work ticket for an opportunity-service onto the appropriate route of the Scheduling Board screen. This will create a visit tile on the schedule board.
2. Right-click the newly created visit tile to display a pop-up menu.
3. Choose the Edit recurring Schedule option from the menu. This will display the Job Service Schedule screen.

4. Properly define the schedule on the Job Service Schedule screen and click Save or Cancel.

5. Aspire will display Save Schedule and Reschedule / Generate Visits screen. Choose the proper date for the first occurrence, choose occurrence 1 as the occurrence at which to begin scheduling, enable the checkbox to View Schedule, and click the Save.

6. Aspire will schedule all the visits and then, since you checked the View Schedule checkbox, it will display the schedule as shown here so you can make any necessary adjustments.On the Work Ticket Schedule screen, there are several things of which you should be aware:

   1. If the schedule you defined does not provide sufficient days to use up all the work tickets, the Occurrences Remaining field will show a non-zero value, all the extra work tickets will have their scheduled date set to the last day of the fiscal year, and their status set to Open – not Scheduled.
   2. This screen will allow you to adjust the schedule that was generated. You can select a month from the yearly calendar to display it on the right. Then you can click on days in the selected month to toggle whether a visit is scheduled for that day.
   3. Once the schedule is laid out properly, you can save it by clicking Save.

The article Establishing Sequence Numbers and recurring Schedules explains how scheduling, sequencing, and recurring schedules function together in Aspire.