Jarmo Tapani Systems and Process Analyst

It is sometimes required to create a 'soft booking' for service engineers. Soft booking is typically used in cases when a large service job with multiple resources is planned for the future or when for instance customer requests to have a specific service engineer to execute service assignment. Soft planning typically then happens prior of receiving a firm purchase order from customer and hard committing to a service assignment.

In our business scheduling is done by a dedicated person who will not be executing the actual service. In existing solution when such person creates an appointment on behalf of a service engineer also the organizer is automatically booked against this appointment even if organized has nothing to do with the actual appointment.

Once an appointment is created it is not very easy to modify it, i.e. to change the dates and times of the appointment.

This idea has two things to consider:

1. it should not be defaulted that organizer automatically gets assigned on appointment
2. It should be possible to adjust appointment on schedule board the same way as booking i.e. to be able to do drag'n'drop, direct editing of start / end dates, extending time frames etc.

It would be good to have some synchronization options available in mobile application to control which data user want to synchronize. Currently when users are online, device will do a full synch of data in and out.

When working in remote locations users should also have an option to only submit data from device to server without loading anything back from server side to the device.

In addition, they would need to have an option to send just very basic data for instance without any images or other multimedia to save bandwidth.

These should be user selectable settings on the mobile application itself since the user would have the best knowledge of existing connectivity in the area.

This setting would make it easier for the back office people to monitor ongoing assignments in remote areas.