10-28-2016, 04:53 PM
Okay, now I have some free time to elaborate:
The company (where I used to work and for which I now maintain the coreBOS installation) use SalesOrders as the heart of activities. For anything taking place in the company, whether that being delivery of a newly sold product or service on existing products a SalesOrder is created. When a technician visits to (for instance) solve a problem or do an annual approval (they also service measurement equipment that needs a mandatory check every year) they also create a SalesOrder on which an estimate of time and materials is made in the inventory part of the salesorder. When the technician is done, he (if necessary) edits the inventory part of the salesorder to (for instance) edit the number of hours and materials used. After that, he sets the status to 'delivered'. The inhouse team gets an email of that status change so they know they can invoice the SO (this process is also being automated, that's why I needed the inventory creation workflow).
Now, the biggest challenge is:
During the visits by the technician that involve mandatory annual checks a report needs to be filled out, custom for that type of product (there are several). Right now that is done by printing the report and the technician filling it out by hand. This is the process that needs automation the most. My goal is to:
This way each examination is treated as an individual conceptual entity, as is the desired behaviour.
From the Schedular module I'm building I'd like to create a "new event" input that links all kinds of records to that event. So an account could be selected, which would let you select multiple assets that belong to that account. The selection of those assets could automatically create examination records for each asset. I still need to think about the best approach for all this, but this is roughly the idea.
The company (where I used to work and for which I now maintain the coreBOS installation) use SalesOrders as the heart of activities. For anything taking place in the company, whether that being delivery of a newly sold product or service on existing products a SalesOrder is created. When a technician visits to (for instance) solve a problem or do an annual approval (they also service measurement equipment that needs a mandatory check every year) they also create a SalesOrder on which an estimate of time and materials is made in the inventory part of the salesorder. When the technician is done, he (if necessary) edits the inventory part of the salesorder to (for instance) edit the number of hours and materials used. After that, he sets the status to 'delivered'. The inhouse team gets an email of that status change so they know they can invoice the SO (this process is also being automated, that's why I needed the inventory creation workflow).
Now, the biggest challenge is:
During the visits by the technician that involve mandatory annual checks a report needs to be filled out, custom for that type of product (there are several). Right now that is done by printing the report and the technician filling it out by hand. This is the process that needs automation the most. My goal is to:
- Create a module of which each record represents an individual examination. The filled report will be part of this record.
- Set this module to be related to assets and sales orders.
- Create a link that creates a examination-record from an asset, thereby creating a UI10 field with a backlink to that asset. Besides that the record should have some specific information like the technician that is going to perform this examination (coreBOS user, probably the standard "assigned to" field), the examination date. The status of the examination (is it completed, does it need an additional examination?). This process should be automated through my Schedular module, but it's not finished yet.
- The examination should also have a reportname selection. That's going to determine which type of report the technician is eventually going to fill.
- When examination records are made, the salesorder for that activity can be created, where financial stuff is handled in the inventory lines.
- The examinations are selected for this salesorder (a process I want to automate through my "Schedular" module, that's not finished yet).
- Now the portal kicks in
- The technician can now go to the special technician portal. Here he can see the salesorder that are designated to him.
- He can fold-out the salesorder to see what special actions are related here (right now only examinations, but this could also be HelpDesk tickets further on).
- He can click each individual examination, after which an HTML report opens for this examination. Of course this should all be responsive, so he can even perform this task on his phone.
- The report is autofilled with the customer and asset data.
- He fills out the report, that stores a JSON object in memory containing the measurements.
- When the report is done, he clicks "send", after which a webservice call to coreBOS is made connection to the examination record. This receives the JSON object and fills out the report in HTML, after which it is sent to mPDF.
- mPDF creates a report from the HTML.
- the examination module saves the PDF in the storage folder and creates a download link in the examination record for this PDF.
This way each examination is treated as an individual conceptual entity, as is the desired behaviour.
From the Schedular module I'm building I'd like to create a "new event" input that links all kinds of records to that event. So an account could be selected, which would let you select multiple assets that belong to that account. The selection of those assets could automatically create examination records for each asset. I still need to think about the best approach for all this, but this is roughly the idea.