2017 has arrived, and with it, a brand new set of features, enhancements and new capabilities added to Unity — our leading work management system. As always, this update is being rolled out to our customer base as part of all our standard subscriptions. Read on for more details of what’s in store.

– Insiris Engineering Team

Job Enhancements

Job Bundling

We’ve added the ability for managers and planners to create Job ‘Bundles’. A Bundle allows you to group work that will be carried out at the same time, by the same person/team, but that may involve different tasks/jobs. Creating a bundle is as simple as marking the parent job as a ‘Bundle’ and then adding Sub Jobs as per normal to the parent. Whenever a sub job is added to the bundle, the parent’s planned duration automatically updates to include the new sub job. Sub Jobs in a bundle are not directly allocated from the planner. Instead, the planner allocates the bundle, and when they dispatch the bundled job, the sub jobs are automatically allocated to the timeslot. We think this is a great way to perform simple, efficient, group planning. Contact our helpdesk if you need a primer on how to set this up!

Job Pushing

Complimentary to Job Revocation is Job Pushing. We’ve utilised the same ‘push’ based technology that means when you dispatch a job, Unity will instantly push it to the worker’s handheld.

Dispatch All/Mine on Planner

Some of our customers have planning teams that are responsible for managing the planning of dozens of jobs on a daily basis. Dispatching each job separately could be a time consuming task; which is why we’ve introduced the ability to ‘Dispatch All’ jobs that are currently on the planner. Your planners are presented with the option to dispatch all jobs across the organisation, or only dispatch the jobs they planned.

Remote Job Searching from device

Workers often find themselves visiting existing customers or carrying out repeated work. We listened to feedback from a number of our users that asked whether mobile users could lookup and refer to past jobs, direct from their handheld. Workers can now perform an online search to search for jobs directly from the handheld — in exactly the same way as they’re used to searching for jobs on their device.

Realtime mode in Planner

The Planner now shows a red line indicating the current time — updated automatically. We think this will help dispatchers and managers keep track of ‘now’ and spot work that is overdue or looking like it might become overdue.

Show in Red when Overdue on Planner

To help compliment realtime mode in the Planner, the planner now colour codes workers who have jobs that are outstanding, in the past. If a job has not been completed, but was scheduled to be, that worker will turn red — helping managers keep on top of SLAs and spot work which is becoming overdue.

Only show Checked In on Planner

This one is particularly useful for those organisations with shift workers. Users can now be hidden automatically from the Planner if they are not checked in. We think this will help planning teams with realtime allocation — by only showing workers they can actually allocate work to, who are checked in.

Workflow Enhancements

Duplicate Workflow Field

Complimenting the duplication of workflow steps, you can also duplicate fields within a workflow — to the same step, or another step. The field’s formula is also duplicated helping save on repeated work.

Asset Management Enhancements

Asset Locking

Customers often have multiple teams working on the same items at once. One area where this can cause problems is managing Assets — two people updating the same asset at the same time, can produce problems. Asset Locking helps manage this process. A user is able to ‘lock’ an asset for a period of time — preventing updates to that asset from anyone but the original user. The lock automatically expires after a period of time — useful in case the user forgets to unlock when they are done!

Live Asset List updating

The main Asset list now automatically refreshes as new changes are made to the data.

Custom Asset statuses

We’ve enhanced the Asset Management system to provide users with the ability to set their own statuses for Assets. Assets can also have their status quickly changed from their main Asset screen, and a full history of who changed what and when is maintained on the Status Log.

Reporting and Management Enhancements

Planner — Group by Asset

With more of our customers using Unity’s Asset Management features, we’ve provided the ability to group unallocated work on the planner by Asset. This is great for those planners and customers that carry out work primarily against assets — whether those assets are machines, properties or anything else out in the field.

Asset Management Reports

As part of our continuing investment in Unity’s Asset Management abilities, we’ve added new Asset Management reports to the system. Extract information from Assets, Cases and Case Assets using highly customisable, powerful reports.

Check In/Check Out from Web App

Our customers love our simple to use Time and Attendance features. Checking In and Out is so simple and intuitive — however sometimes a user forgets! This can cause problems if businesses are using check in/outs to track worker attendance and generate timesheets/calculate pay. We’ve now added the ability for managers to manually Check In/Check Out workers from the web app.

New International Support

We now support a number of languages and locales in the Unity Web and Mobile Apps.

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