More features around activities and tasks coming soon

Soon activities and tasks for work orders will be considerably more powerful and useful.  Once these changes are complete, a user will be able to:

1. Add standard activities to a work order as needed (vs. ad-hoc only today).
2. Automatically email technicians paperwork needed for an install prefilled with information required for the site visit.
3. Automatically include pricing based on a standard activity added to a work order on demand.

Presently activities and tasks are defined via the work order template for a given project.  Once work orders have been created in a project one can still modify the activities within the template.  Activities added/deleted from the template, at the user’s choice, may or may not propagate down to work orders dependent upon them.  We are proposing this behavior change slightly to help companies standardize their processes better.

So in the new world, template activities will work like this…

1. New template activities can either be propagated to each underlying work order or saved for inclusion at a later date (not propagated).
   
   • New activities not automatically propagated to the underlying work order become available on demand for any work order in the project.
   • For a work order, if a single activity needs to be added, the user can choose one of these special activities predefined from the template (ie, Site Revisit).
   • At this point the direction is to not allow ad hoc activities allowed to be added to individual work orders. This is something that can be done today, but making the definition of allowed activities for a work order being controlled by the project manager seems like a better solution than allowing ad-hoc activities.
2. So that underlying work orders will always match their parent template
   
   • Deleted template activities will always delete in the underlying work orders.
   • Updated template activities will always update in the work orders as well.

Additionally activities can be marked to have documentation attached.  So when assignment and/or reminder emails are sent, the appropriate documentation can be sent as well.  In addition, documentation in the form of Microsoft Word files can have fields defined that are populated by BigWave when the email is sent.  This should help save the project team a lot of time in communicating with the technicians in the field.

In addition to all that, having standard activities enables the project manager to add pricing to a work order when a unplanned activity is added to the work order (like Site Revisit for example).  Once this functionality is complete pricing can be automatically added to the work order when one of these standard activities is added.  If the activity is subsequently removed, the pricing will be removed as well.

We look forward to any feedback you or your team might have on this!