About Scheduling

An appointment is a scheduled task assigned to a partner. The appointment can be associated with a service order or incident. Appointments have a status that is independent from the service order or incident and used for tracking.

Appointments are displayed on the Calendar Scheduling form in the Scheduling board. You can schedule multiple appointments and multiple partners for one service order or incident.

Scheduling vs. Dispatching

Although scheduling and dispatching are very similar actions, within this application they are separate processes to support the different ways a partner is assigned to a task.

Scheduling

Scheduling is used when the scheduler wants to view all the partner schedules and place the appointment for new tasks manually into a time slot.

If your business typically queues multiple tasks and then schedules them across the partner base at a later time, select To Be Scheduled on each incident.

Then later open the Calendar Scheduling form to create the appointments. The Calendar Scheduling form is usually open at all times, and the scheduler drags and drops appointments from the Tasks To Be Scheduled grid onto the calendar grid.

After the appointment is on the grid, the partner is assigned and To Be Scheduled is cleared on the incident.

Dispatching

Dispatching is intended to handle scenarios where the task is assigned to a partner using the next available time slot.

If your business typically schedules one task at a time, click Dispatch on the Incidents form or Service Orders form to create the appointment on the Dispatch Scheduling form.

The Dispatch Scheduling form tries to identify the best available partner by matching the duration required by the tasks with the next available partner who has the appropriate skills, certifications and coverage area.

Click Create Appointment on that form to generate a scheduling appointment record for the specified partner.

Color Coding

On the Color Coding form, set up the colors you want to use to represent different appointment statuses and types on the Calendar Scheduling form. You can utilize the color coding on the Scheduling board in these ways:

As a dispatcher, follow the appointments through the process by changing the color as the appointment status changes.
Identify the different types of appointments that are being performed.