Planning Mode

Do you schedule work days or weeks in advance, only to find those schedules change?
After building a work schedule, do you need to confirm dates and times with customers or colleagues?

If so, try Planning Mode in the FieldAware Scheduler.

Planning Mode lets you create tentative schedules, confirm the dates and times, and dispatch jobs to technicians only when you are happy with the plan. You can reschedule and reassign jobs without bombarding your technicians with notifications.

Other members of your back-office team can view the details of Tentative and Confirmed jobs, so they can see the status of jobs and won’t make accidental changes.

Yes. For work that requires immediate dispatch, such as reactive jobs and jobs that will not change, we recommend that you continue to schedule, assign and dispatch using the standard workflow.

Read more about workflows in the section below.

Planning Mode is accessed via the FieldAware Scheduler. When you enter this mode you can transition jobs between Tentative, Confirmed and Dispatched job states.

Tentative

Confirmed

Dispatched

Use the Planning Mode button to enter Planning Mode.

Planning Mode has a dedicated toolbar to help you manage the jobs. These tools allow you to select jobs, change the state, unassign, and save or discard your changes.

Use the toolbar to unassign jobs or change between Tentative, Confirmed or Dispatch states.

In Planning Mode you can select jobs using Shift+click or dragging a fence around the job blocks.

You can also use the “Select all…” shortcut buttons to select tentative and confirmed jobs.

When finished, save your changes by clicking Done. You can also choose to discard your changes.

It is recommended to use the standard workflow for jobs that require immediate dispatch, such as reactive jobs and jobs that are not expected to be rescheduled.

Step 1: Identify the Unassigned Job that you wish to assign.

Step 2: In the Job Page, assign the job and click Save. Alternatively, in the standard Scheduler mode, drag and drop the job from the unassigned list to the required technician.

Outcome: Job is now dispatched and will appear on the technician’s device.

Note: Delayed Dispatch and Recurring Jobs follow the dispatch delay timer. You can force-dispatch these jobs by clicking the Dispatch button in the Job Page.

It is recommended to use Planning Mode for work that is planned days or weeks in advance, like preventive maintenance. It is also useful for jobs which are subject to change, or require a confirmation step such as customer confirmation or availability of parts.

Step 1 - Building a schedule: When manually creating a schedule, click the Planning Mode button in the Scheduler and drag jobs from the Unassigned List. Jobs will be automatically set to Tentative. Technicians do not receive updates as you build your schedule in Planning Mode. Click Done to save your changes.

Also note that jobs returned from the Smart Scheduler are set to Tentative by default. This is to allow you to confirm the schedule before dispatching to your field technicians.

Step 2 - Viewing schedules: On viewing the Scheduler, back-office staff can see that Tentative and Confirmed jobs are assigned. Tentative, Confirmed and Dispatched jobs are shown whether in the standard Scheduler view or in Planning Mode. This helps you and your teammates avoid modifying each other’s work.

Step 3 - Modifying a schedule: To edit the current schedule, click the Planning Mode button. All jobs in the schedule can now be edited. You can add/remove, reschedule and reassign jobs.

Use the multi-select tools and the toolbar to toggle jobs between Tentative, Confirmed and Dispatched. Confirmed jobs are similar to Tentative in that they are only visible to the back-office. The Confirm step is a way of identifying that the details of job have been confirmed - such as customer availability, parts availability, or some other dependency. Confirmed is an optional state - you can transition jobs directly from Tentative to Dispatched.

Technicians are not pinged about changes to Tentative and Confirmed jobs, meaning you can do this work at any time of the day without bothering your field teams. Job will only be visible to technicians when jobs are Dispatched.

Step 4 - Dispatching a schedule: When you are happy with the schedule, use the toolbar to Dispatch the jobs. Technicians will receive a push notification when the job is dispatched.

Step 5 - Save or discard your work: Click the Done button to save your changes. Select “discard changes” if you do not wish to save.

Note: Your changes are not committed until you click Done.

The Planning Mode states are visible in the Job Page, but they cannot be modified from here. Use Planning Mode in the Scheduler to transition between states.

Tentative, confirmed and dispatched states can be viewed in the Jobs List.

The following actions are available in Planning Mode

The following actions are disabled in Planning Mode:

Multi-select in Planning Mode is designed for unassigning jobs and setting them to Tentative, Confirmed or Dispatched. Dragging to bulk-reschedule or bulk-assign is not permitted at this time.

There are three ways to multi-select jobs in Planning Mode:

If the changes you make in Planning Mode trigger one or more Policy Rule violations, you will be required to approve all violations with a single Approval step on clicking Done.

Deferred dispatch jobs and recurring jobs have a dispatch timer that is set to dispatch the job to the mobile at a certain time before the job’s scheduled start time. Such jobs which are in the Tentative or Confirmed state will not be dispatched when the timer runs down. They will only be dispatched by the timer if they are in the Dispatch state.

These jobs can be manually force-dispatched from the Job Page as normal.

Only jobs which are assigned can be tentative or confirmed. When a tentative or confirmed job is unassigned, it reverts to a ‘standard’ scheduled unassigned job. It does not stay tentative/confirmed ‘in the background’.

There is no versioning or private drafts of schedules created in Planning Mode. When you save your changes, those changes are visible to all relevant users of the system. This is to prevent accidental updates to jobs by different users.