Grid View

Rosters are usually developed in advance based on the business's known needs or forecast demand, and ratified based on resource availability and changes in demand.

For example:

The grid view creates a new lens within Skedulo to view and manage this work, and provides a more holistic view of a schedule and reduces the time taken to manage it.

When grid view is enabled for your org it is accessible under Schedule -> Grid View (beta) in the global navigation bar.

The work shown on the page is color-blocked, with the color being representative of its status, which makes it easier to identify the status of all jobs and activities in the grid view at a glance.

Pagination

The grid view page initially shows 25 records by default, with the ability to increase the number shown on each page. Ideally, however, rather than increasing the number of resources shown within the page, filters can be utilized to minimize the data into practical volumes that can be efficiently managed by schedulers.

Skedulo also recommends this approach to avoid performance impacts on the grid view page that might occur with a large number of records.

Pagination and record per page controls are available at the bottom of the grid view page.

Figure 1. Pagination controls

 

You can view the grid as either one week or two weeks, which you might choose to select to align with a bi-weekly payroll cycle.

Figure 2. Week selection

By default, the grid view shows one week beginning on the current date.

The grid view includes a calendar tool, which allows you to select the date from which you want to view the grid.

Figure 3. Date selection

Select the date you want the grid view to start from.

Click the Today button in the upper-left corner to return the displayed schedule to the current day as the first day in the grid view.

There are a number of ways to filter the data displayed in the grid view, and these filters are applied as either hard or soft filters.

You can add multiple filters to a view using the + Add Filter button from the grid filter menu bar to add additional filtering.

Filters are cumulative, so the grid page can be filtered to show a more specific subset of work by adding multiple filters.

This is intended to provide the ability to view the work more holistically, covering scenarios such as a scheduler who is only responsible for managing the work within a specific region, or location, but requiring visibility of resources work within another region or location.

Applying filtering to one location, enabling schedulers to only manage the work that falls within the applied filters, but retaining visibility on the work for the resources shown outside of the filters so as to have an understanding of their existing schedule of work, facilitating in conflict management.

Resource availability is displayed as a high-level representation to give schedulers a general understanding of whether a resource is available or unavailable to be assigned work, however, it is not indicative of the detailed availability times.

An unallocated row sits at the top of the list of resources and shows the work that is either unallocated or where the requirements for the work have not been fulfilled.

For example, the number of resources required to complete the job has not been met.

You can drag and drop work from the unallocated row to a resource, and equally from a resource to the unallocated row.

When dragging work that has been defined as requiring a specific resource profile, or many resources to fulfill, it will be allocated to the resource the work is dragged to, but still remain within the unallocated row until the requirements have been fulfilled.

Figure 4. Drag and drop allocation

Allocate a job with multiple resource requirements using the grid view.

You can create jobs, activities, and shifts from both resource and location views in the Skedulo web application grid view.

This allows schedulers to see a more holistic view of the current work schedule and resource availability when creating ad hoc work so that they can distribute work appropriately.

To add a new job, shift, or activity to the grid view, hover over the grid that corresponds to the day and resource or location where you want to create the work and click the + icon to reveal the drop-down menu.

If you create the work from a resource's grid it will automatically be assigned to that resource.

Creating work from the location view automatically creates the work at the location's address.

Alternatively, you can also create unassigned work from the Unallocated row to be assigned at a later stage.

Grid view includes exceptions notifications on jobs that have conflicts or otherwise break business rules.

The following are some of the exceptions that are currently detected:

Work with scheduling exceptions appears in the grid view shaded in red with an exclamation icon.

Hover over the work card to view the exception reason.

Figure 5. A job with exceptions

 

You can open the job or activity card by clicking the view icon in the upper-right corner of the card. This will cause you to leave the grid view and open the job or activity details page where you can adjust the job requirements manually if you prefer.

To attempt to resolve scheduling conflicts within the grid view, drag the card to reschedule it or assign it to a different resource.

Copy functionality is intended to significantly reduce the time taken for schedulers to recreate or replicate a schedule of work.

It copies the records that fall within the applied filters, inclusive of anything that is off-page due to pagination, and exclusive of any work being shown on the page that falls outside of the selected filters.

It copies the work and the related records within the Skedulo core data model, leveraging the same model and approach currently implemented for recurring schedules, referencing the custom field mappings defined in the Skedulo web application custom settings.

The following records are copied:

Copying records creates a lookup relationship to the record the work was duplicated from. This relationship can be leveraged by services to develop custom copy behavior for a unique customer or industry-specific requirements.

The copy service is a synchronous process, which batches data to navigate around the Salesforce data creation limitations.

The backend copy service is also intended to have greater benefits than just within the grid view:

You can use the copy modal to select the time period you want to copy and the period you want to copy it to.

This duplicates the work, with unallocated work remaining unallocated, and work assigned to a resource remaining assigned, but reverted to Pending Dispatch status.

Schedulers can efficiently manage work by selecting multiple records within the page to perform bulk deallocation or dispatch actions against only those specific records.

Using bulk actions, you can select multiple work cards to perform the same action across all.

When one card has been selected, the checkbox will show against all others.

The grid view includes dispatch functionality to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes schedulers to dispatch an entire schedule of work.

You can apply the filter options to dispatch a specific set of records within the grid view. This will dispatch all records that fall within the applied filters inclusive of anything that is off-page due to pagination, and exclusive of any 'out of filters' work being shown on the page.

This works similarly to the copy service.

Dispatching the work will see jobs updated to dispatched and shifts updated to published.

The new bulk notification service sends resources a single notification of all the work dispatched to them in the bulk dispatch action, as opposed to resources receiving a notification per record dispatched. 

Utilizing the bulk notification service has the following caveats: