New improvements just in time for springtime:
This version also includes multiple bug fixes related to the sudden, temporary disappearance of newly created tasks and those linked to assignees originating from multiple service points. We apologize if these abnormal behaviors affected your operations over the past few months.
Thank you very much, and please continue to send us your feedback and bug reports at info@wpred.com!
The integration between wpred.com weather maps and the WPlanif maintenance calendar gets an update with the new concept of work site categories.
Work sites must now be link with a single "Site category":
The chosen category appears as a colored badge next to the work site name within the main calendar:
The list of available categories can be customized through the management interface:
The initial list of categories is purely a suggestion and should be customized to your liking:
Note: The first site category in the list is the "default" category applied to new work sites.
Assignee groups that are flagged as being Service Points can now be customized further to add the proper coordinates of the team's home base:
Note: When no coordinates are given and the service point appears on a map (see below), the geographical average of all its linked work sites (and their equipment) will be used.
These new options open up the possibility of mapping regions, service points and work sites on regional maps. These maps can be made available within your organization's wpred.com account (separate login required):
Please contact us at info@wpred.com if you are interested in supplementing your forecasts with such maps.
WPlanif can now help you with your mid-to-long term capacity planning. Also, new archival features in the management interface help you phase out old reference entities with ease.
The work task form's advanced properties panel was reworked and the entire form was enhanced to make obvious the:
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When the theoretical effort field of "man-hours per machine" is cleared and the value is Unknown, the workload is automatically determined to correspond to the number of total hours booked in the assignee schedules:
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Tip: Hover over the field to the right of "Total theoretical workload": it explain the logic of the workload sums.
These per-work-task values are then summed and aggregated over an entire Assigne Group calendar (covering the current time period selected) to give us a brand new Capacity Analysis accessible at the top-right of the list of the team's work site calendars:
The capacity planning panel replaces space taken up usually by the work site calendars. It breaks down the statistics in two sections:
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In the example above, all Preventive Maintenance and Foundation Work have yet to be assigned, but you can visually determine that there are more than enough free hours in the assignee calendars to fullfil this workload.
Please note that it is possible to complete a capacity analysis on past time periods in a historical fashion. However, the Schedule of the current team section only takes into account the current list of active assignees in the group. It is highly likely that old technicians have since been archived and that new ones have been introduced to the assignee group. In such cases, the recommendation is to temporarily adjust the set of active technicians by archiving/reactivating them in the management interface before completing a capacity analysis.
Here are a few more example of Workload on-site (i.e. the "demand" for human resources) vs. Team schedule (the "offer") which highlight different troublesome capacity planning situations.
Example 1 - When too much work has been planned on the work sites, and we don't have enough assignee capacity fullfil this demand (i.e. not enough free time remaining):
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Example 2 - When no free time remains in the assignee calendars and their schedule has been overbooked (leading also to missing capacity to fulfill the as-of-yet unbooked workload):
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The workload on-site can be fulfilled by 3 types of assignees:
The new capacity analysis panel also highlights work that has been planned with assignees that don't belong to the local team. The portions of work completed by other teams and being subcontracted appear in:
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When it comes time for a bit of Spring cleaning, the WPlanif management functionality has been historically lacking. With v5.0, WPlanif introduces the "Archive" action on all types of entities in the calendar management screens.
For example, you can archive a Task Type from the list in their management screen:
And from the archived elements page, you can restore the item - should you need it again down the road:
Please send us your feedback at info@wpred.com. We look forward to hearing back from you.