Recent Development Highlights
simPRO is constantly evolving. Due to the growing number of companies choosing to implement simPRO to simplify their business, we are always coming across new and better ways to get the job done. Here is some of the latest developments that we have rolled out.
These development highlights include Labour Type Multiplier / Fit times, Walk Order, Project Scheduling, PDA Upgrades.
Labour Type Multiplier / Fit times
So you have a prebuild library of all the different work you do, but you find that when you use an prebuild on an estimate you’re not entirely confident that you have allowed the correct amount of labour because the scenario for this job is slightly different to the what was in mind when the prebuild was created.
Or perhaps you may want to know based on the labour demographics that you’re using, how much time should be allowed on the job taking into account the skill levels and productivity of apprentices vs. fully qualified technicians?
Hmmm… what to do?
Enter, labour type multipliers and fit times. First I’ll go through them separately, though if you pair these two up, you end up with some very powerful functionality giving you great flexibility in your estimating.
Go to Admin → Setup → Labour → Rates. In here you can specify as many different labour rates as you like. Typically these will be configured for the different charge out rates you have and often this will also mean different rates for tradesman vs TA’s, apprentices etc. There is now an additional column called Multiplier.
Here is how it works: lets say to do a particular job, a tradesman will take 1hr, where a 2nd yr apprentice will take 1.5hrs. Here, because we are basing our rates on what the tradesman can do we will leave that labour type at a multiplier of 1 and put the apprentice labour type with a multiplier of 1.5. This is indicating that a second year apprentice will take 50% longer to complete the work than a fully qualified technician, so 1.5 hours instead of 1 hour (if a multiplier of 2 was used, that would indicate that labour type would take 100% longer to do the work, or 2 hours instead 1).
Now lets jump to a job (add/edit items). With this configuration if I put my technician labour on the job it will say I need 60 mins. If I change that labour type to apprentice then it tell me that I will need 90 mins on the job. However, if I put a tradesman and an apprentice on the job I will now need 75 minutes on the job as it averages across the 2.
Ok, in this instance I may base (for example) all my prebuilds time on the basis of installing to plasterboard. But what happens now when I need to fix to concrete, hard wood, brick etc.? Now we have the option of applying different fit times for different scenarios that you can apply to the same prebuild which will increase the estimated time required to complete the job.
To configure the fit times head over to Admin → Setup → Labour → Fit Times.
Create as many as you want. Think of these perhaps as degree’s of difficulty. You can put in your fit time name (eg. Concrete, Normal, Hard Wood, Poor Access etc) then apply the appropriate multiplier. As with the labour multiplier, you use 1.1 to increase the time by 10%, 1.5 for a 50% increase in time etc.
Back in our job now (add/edit items), next to all the items on the job you can set in the time column, what the fit time should be. So if I have my original prebuild at 60 minutes, and apply a fit time of say concrete which has a 2x multiplier on it, the prebuild will now need 120 minutes to install.
Pretty cool huh.
Now let’s get tricky with it. Let’s say we have a prebuild with 60 minutes required on it. I apply the concrete fit time, which now says I need 120 minutes, however I am going to use an apprentice and a tradesman to do it for me. Now I am actually going to need 2.5 hours to do it all up.
Well, that should take out a whole lot of the guess work for me. I encourage you guys to go into the system and have a play with the different scenario’s and how they effect the billable time on the jobs. If you need any more help, please feel free to head over to our online help.
Do you perform testing on equipment on sites that a lot of equipment? Do you struggle to know which order you should be doing the testing to be most efficient and to make sure nothing is missed? What a pain in the proverbial it is to setup a field and have to manually enter a number or order in there to adjust this order.
Well now you can use walk orders on assets to determine the order of which you should run around the site testing the equipment. On a location under the assets tab you will now be able to specify the order in which they appear and can be ordered (you can even share orders between asset types) which dictates to your printable reports (assuming they have not been customised) which order to print out and tells the Ultra Mobile and PDA which order to display in to do the testing.
Should be a little easier.
There have been upgrades to the scheduling a-plenty over the last couple of months. The biggest and most notable is the project scheduling. If you use mobility you have probably already realised that you no longer need to use the `send to mobile’ from the schedule and the mobility status have now also been built into the standard auto status triggers. Also in response to requests from the various user forums we had around the country this year there have been other enhancements – the major of these is Project Scheduling.
Project scheduling comes in two forms, employee view and job view. Both operate pretty much the same way and allow you to schedule your jobs over large periods of time much easier than before. The project view is laid out similarly to the day view where you can schedule horizontally, which has proven to be a much better method of scheduling rather than vertically for multiple resources (employees, contractors and plant).
With job view you see all the jobs listed down the left hand side of the page where you would normally see the employee’s, though this is limited to 30 jobs so we have built many filtering options to make sure you get the right jobs on the list. Then based on the availability time on the resource you just drag across as many days as you want and the full time of the day for that employee/contractor/plant item that you have selected. Any conflicts found will be highlighted as well. In employee view it’s a very similar method to the day view where you see all your resources down the side and you can simply drag across as much time for a particular job as you would like as well. There is heaps more to it, though when you get a minute go and have a play in there.
There have been a number of enhancements for the PDA system in this upgrade, noticeably the fact that job information is easily retrievable if you loose connection, easier job dispatch, asset testing functions, on hold outcomes and up to date reporting on where the jobs are up to (travelling, on site etc…).
For a more comprehensive list of updates for the PDA, go to Help → Software Updates → Previous Versions and you will see a much wider list of upgrades.
For more information on these or any other benefits simPRO can deliver for you, please feel free to contact us anytime.
