Schedule Assistant helps dispatchers find efficient job times by balancing technician schedules and customer availability. It ranks options by added drive time and filters by date, job type, zones, and technician skills. You need technician shifts set up first.
Release notes, highlights. So basically, Schedule Assistant is going to help your dispatchers find a time to schedule jobs that is most efficient for you, that also works for your customer. So Schedule Assistant is an optional feature. But real quick, let me demonstrate to you a simple way to know if you need this. Go and sit down next to somebody who books jobs in your company and just watch how they do it. If it looks anything like this. Okay, how's today at 4? Okay. How about tomorrow at 2? Okay. Saturday? Can't do that. Monday at 3? Got it. Then you need schedule assistance. So let me show you how this works. Like normal, you'll fill out the basic job details on the call booking screen. Then you'll click this button that says Schedule Assistant and that will bring up this page. Then you can input a date range. So if you're looking for something this week, you would put in that date range. You could also enter in a time range if the customer said that only afternoons work for them or something like that. You could enter that here. You could choose what days to look at. So we're going to ignore the weekend here. Job type and business unit will be filled in for us. And then we have these toggle switches to filter which technicians we want to see. So in this case, we're going to show technicians who have the skills assigned for this job and to have on booked availability. We could also toggle on in this zone if we had technicians that only worked in certain zones. Then we hit search, and that's where the magic happens. So it is going to show us a menu of options highlighting the most efficient first, and then the options get less efficient as they go on. Now I'm showing this in a sample account, so there's not a whole lot of data here. So you're seeing that my guy Dan here is showing up as the best technician for, like every option. He probably just has a house that is close to this jobs. And you can see that. So it says his first stop is his house. He's dispatching from home. And then boom, his first stop would be this, 8 to 10. So in this, admittedly not great example, you can see that this adds eight minutes to his day, but all of them add eight minutes to his day. And we have multiple pages here. So on the second page, we're getting into Matt, who is again dispatching from home, but lives farther away. So this would be adding 10 minutes to Matt's day. So he's further down. But here's an example of what it looks like with a more filled in and complex schedule. So it's going to show you where it suggests putting it in and it's going to show you how much drive time that is adding to that technician's day. Once you find one that's good for both you and the customer, then you'll click Save and then that will input all of that information for you. And now you're ready to book the job. Now you're also able to run Schedule Assistant from the dispatch board. So if you have separate CSRs and dispatchers and the CSRs are just throwing jobs into unassigned, and then it's up to the dispatchers to find the best place once, well, Schedule Assistant is still great for you as well. So you see here I have a job in unassigned. I can right click it and then click Schedule Assistant and that will pull up that same page if I did want to move something. I'm also able to run Schedule Assistant on jobs that are already on the board. I really love this feature. Dispatching is a difficult job and there's a lot of factors to take into account at any given time. So I think Schedule Assistant is really useful to narrow down the infinite options to just a list of things that will actually make sense. Now, a couple of things to know about Schedule Assistant. One is that it is one of those features that you have to ask for. So if this is something that you want turned on in your account, talk to your csm. Now, before you can use Schedule Assistant, you will have to first set up Technician shifts. So you may already be using Technician shifts, but if you're not, that is a prerequisite for Schedule Assistant. And there is a walkthrough in the knowledge base that can help you get Technician shifts set up. And the other thing to know is that as of this initial release, Schedule Assistant does not yet talk to Adjustable Capacity Planning. Now you can have both Schedule Assistant and Adjustable Capacity Planning on. But if you go in and manually adjust your capacity, say you want to take away capacity for a certain day because it's going to be really hot and you expect a lot of demand calls for H Vac. Schedule Assistant is not going to know that you did that. It's going to show the actual availability for that day. At least for now. There are plans to integrate it with Adjustable Capacity Planning in the future. Hey, thanks so much for watching Mighty kind of ya. If you want to check out the full release Notes video, here's a link to it right around here. Or if not, here's another video I think you might enjoy. I'm just gonna sit here and stare at you until you pick one. That's right. Go on. Okay. Interesting choice.
