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Jun 15, 2023

Syrinx Operator Scheduler

Overview

The Operator Scheduler is a stand-alone solution which offers a new way to schedule your staff operators on operated contracts within Syrinx. The streamlined solution offers greater flexibility and functionality over the previous implementation and is designed for the end user to manage their staff and 3rd party operators more efficiently. The new stand-alone solution can be split up into 3 distinct areas; the Schedule View area, the Properties pane and the Staff Members list.

Some of the key features of the Operator Scheduler include:

Full screen capability with the ability to resize and zoom in on the main scheduling area.
Drag and drop functionality to enable users to allocate staff members to contracts quickly and easily.
Resizable shifts allow easy modifications of start/end times.
Extended system options and user privileges to allow total control of how the app looks and behaves.
Staff members can be filtered on various attributes including the ability to filter staff members on how far they are away from a certain site.
The ability to text/email staff members directly from the app.
Week and Month view give the user a much wider scope for their scheduling.
Advanced searching facilities which allow the user to find contracts/staff members with ease.
Can schedule in Contract view or Operator view giving the user more options in how they want to work.
Can repeat a certain shift schedule on a contract for any amount of time into the future by the click of a button.

Schedule View Area

This is the main area where the user schedules their contracts. Each contract is listed down the side and the times are listed above. The start/end times of the day can be set via two new system options and the you can also change whether you want to see the previous and/or next day at the same time.

The default scheduling view is Contract where the user drags operators to the contracts that they will be working on. However, if you want to change the view to Operator, you will be able to drag contracts to operators. To do that, change the View switch in the top right hand corner of the schedule view.

Any jobs that are linked to the (mobile) Operator App will have a colour coded status in the bottom left hand corner as displayed in the contract to the right. The colour relates to the status of the job in the Operator App. Yellow = In Progress, Green = Complete, Red = Failed, Orange = En-route.

The two different views that the user can schedule in.

Shifts can be moved and resized on each respective contract although the scheduler still uses the same validation rules that Syrinx currently does so there are certain rules that are still in place (such as observing the minimum gap between shifts for contracts using shift patterns).

Users will be prevented from dropping a shift on to a contract on the contract’s start date or planned offhire date if the shift will start/end before or after the contract’s start/end time:

You can now drag a series of shifts onto a contract using the New Shifts button located next to the Current View switch in the top right hand corner.

Dragging this onto the schedule view will result in a dialog box asking you how many shifts you want and how long the shifts should be. This will then create as many consecutive shifts it needs to on that contract and you can then assign the shifts to the specific operators.

The schedule view currently provides three different views to the user: Day, Week and Month which the user can schedule in :

Changing the view is accessed via the navigation bar.

Week view shows the entire week (Mon-Sunday) and gives a better overview of where workers will be during this time.

Month view shows all the shifts for each contract/operator in a different manner for the current month. Because Month view takes up a large amount of space, each day will only show a max of one shift, with an arrow the user can press to expand to show all shifts for that day.

You can change the depot that you are scheduling for using the depot drop down at the top left of the screen. This will update the contracts/operators based on the choice made and scheduling can be done across any depot to which you have access.

You can also search the schedule view for certain contracts/operators. In contract view, this search box works across the equipment and customer name – whereas in operator view, the search box works across staff name. It helps filter the schedule view down to just the contracts/operators you are interested in scheduling against.

In addition to the general search on the schedule view – the user can also search across shifts currently scheduled using Shift Search:

Shift Search shows all the shifts currently scheduled for whatever view you are in and displays them in an easy-to-read grid. Highlighting a shift and pressing OK will instantly highlight that shift on the schedule view.

Shift Search implements a full text search across the columns and it also offers fully integrated filtering and search functionality within each individual column too. To filter on a column, simply press the filter button on the column and in the example below we are filtering on the Operator column and you can see that we can choose individual Operators to filter on or specify filter rules.

If a more general search is required, you can use the “Search Term” box at the top to type in what they want to search for:

One point of reference is that if the search term contains a space then you should surround the search terms in double quotations. For example, if you wanted to find all shifts for the staff member James Dowland, you would have to type “James Dowland”. If you omitted the double quotations, the search would return all jobs that contained the words James or Dowland.

The user can also email and text operators from this screen. The email/text functionality works off whatever is filtered on the Shift Search screen. So, in a grid of 7 shifts, if you have filtered it down to just 2 shifts using the full text search or the column filters – then when you press email/text, the email/text will only go to the operators on those 2 shifts.

If the operators do not have email addresses or mobile phones then the user is told about this when pressing the button. The email runs off the SMTP settings that are used within Syrinx and the text messaging service requires TextAnywhere to be set up before-hand.

Properties Pane

The properties pane lives on the right-hand side of the schedule view and this pane can be extended and compacted as the user wants. To do this you can simply drag the green dividing line between the properties pane and the schedule view to the left and right.

The property pane shows the properties on what is currently selected in the schedule view/operators list. The objects that have properties are as follows: Contracts, Operators and Shifts.

Currently selected contract property pane

Currently selected operator property pane

Currently selected shift property pane.

Some properties can be changed here, such as changing the operator on a shift, adding notes, etc.

There are various tables included in each of the pane views too:

Equipment on the contract/shift.

The future schedule of an operator (including any absences).

Operators assigned to work on a contract.

Any qualifications the operator has.

If a shift is selected, you have the option to repeat the shift on the schedule using the Repeat Schedule button. The user will then enter a start and end date and that shift will be repeated every single day between the user entered date range.

Bottom List

Like the properties pane, the bottom list can be extended and compacted to give or take more space to itself and the schedule view. Again, this is done by moving the dividing line between the jobs list and schedule view up and down.

In contract view, the bottom list is populated with operators and when in operator view it holds the contracts. Regardless of which view the user is in, each column can be filtered and sorted on just like in Shift Search.

Like the Shift Search, there is text/email functionality which allows you to text or email the filtered list of operators. You can also change depots to look at operators based at other depots.

When viewing operators in the bottom list there are 4 main filtering functions at the top of the list (provided a contract or shift is selected):

Filtering functions (all disabled).

Filtering functions (two enabled).

Allocated?

This filters out all operators that are not allocated to the contract. The available operators can be seen in the “Operators” table against the contract in the properties pane.

Available?

This filters out all operators that are not available. This could be because they are marked as “Unavailable”, are absent or are working on a different contract.

Qualified?

If the contract has any required qualifications then using this filter will only show operators where they have the relevant qualifications.

Distance Radius

This filter requires the site to have lat/long coordinates set against it and set against the staff member’s address. You can then enter a figure for the mile radius which filters out operators that do not fall within that range.

Misc. Features

As explained previously, there are a new set of system options available on the Operator Schedule tab of Syrinx SP Configuration\System Options\General that control the default behaviour for the Operator Scheduler such as default shift length, show previous/next day, etc. You can also enabled the option to send SMS messages to operators from this screen