Process Strategies for Scheduling Appointments

This article reviews the various options for defining how you want your staff to handle scheduling various types of appointments in your job processes.  All appointments in SolarNexus are modeled as tasks (i.e. milestones, or milestone subtasks) that also include calendar start times and durations.

NOTE:  SolarNexus recommends using external calendar synchronization to improve scheduling in available timeslots, as well as enabling the ongoing management of your tasked events using your external calendar application (e.g. Google, iCal, Outlook, etc).

 

Scheduling Process Options

SolarNexus gives you multiple options for defining how scheduling events will be done in your job processes. The options are described below, listed in order of most to least flexible.

NOTES:

• ALL of the options described below will result in events scheduled onto your SolarNexus calendar, and synchronized with the external calendars of individual users (if user has connected to their external calendar).
• Note that once a milestone is scheduled, it may be rescheduled by simply drag & drop on the Calendar view of the Tasks screen, or by clicking on the scheduled time in the Task view

 

Option 1: Use Ad-hoc Subtasks

This is the most flexible option because the process does not impose any requirements. These events are essentially manually created on an as-needed basis. This option is the best for the following use cases:

• Appointments that you want your team to consider, but can be optional (that is, you may not want to create one for every job). Sales consultations could be considered are not rigidly required
• Handling unusual exceptions to your regular process. For example, use to create an "AHJ re-inspection" event in the "AHJ Inspection and Approval" milestone after the initial inspection failed and the correction has been implemented.

The series of Tasks section screenshots below shows an example where there is an optional subtask on the "Qualify Lead" milestone telling the user to 'Schedule Sales Consultation' (required subtasks have an asterisk). 

 

To schedule a Sales Consultation, The user would click the Add Task icon and define a "Sales Consultation" subtask as a scheduled event in the Other Tasks card as shown above.

 

Since the 'Schedule sales consulation' is optional, the user may use their own discretion to either complete that subtask, or to delete it.

By default, Subtasks are required by default. The administrator can make the subtask optional for the "Qualify Lead" milestone by checking the "Completion is Optional" checkbox, as shown below in the admin screenshot for the 'Schedule sales consultation' subtask:

 

 

NOTE - A potential downside of using subtasks is that they are not available in reporting.

 

Option 2: Appointments as Part of a Larger Milestone

An important aspect of milestones, is that users cannot manually add new milestones to a job, but they can add subtasks to an existing milestone. Like option 1, this option also uses subtasks for the scheduled events - but rather than the user manually creating the events, the milestone includes an already defined, but unscheduled subtask. This option is good if your milestone definitely has one scheduled event, but could potentially need additional events in order to complete the work.

Installations are a good example of this use case. Although all installations will have at least one scheduled install event, there are many cases where the installation will occur over the course of multiple, non-consecutive days.

The example shown below is the base milestone configuration that is populated for every PV job. This arrangement allows the user to add more install day events by simply clicking the 'Add Task' icon and manually defining additional install events if the job needs it. This provides the flexibility needed for completing the installation milestone regardless of job variations.

 

When an administrator defines subtasks on a milestone, the subtask may be defined as a calendar event, see below.

 

NOTE - As stated in option #1, subtasks are not available in reporting.

 

Option 3: Required Appointment, Preceding Milestone Does Not Schedule

In this option, we are defining a required event milestone for a given job (remember that you can define relevance rules on milestones to limit what jobs this milestone will be used). The key point here is that if the milestone is relevant to the job, the user MUST complete the milestone for the job to proceed.

In the example scenario below, we are populating the scheduled event milestone called "Conduct Sales Consultation" into the Tasks screen at the same time (same predecessor) as the "Qualify Lead" milestone. This allows the user to click on the "unscheduled" calendar icon, and set the date-time for this milestone.

 

To configure a scheduled event milestone to be populated without a predefined date-time, the administrator leaves the "Use Preceding Milestone(s) to Schedule this Event" option unchecked (see below).

 

 

Option 4: Scheduling and Appointment Required

This option is similar to option #3, but in this case we are defining a pair of milestones:

1. (milestone 1) Schedule 'event X' (the activity is simply to schedule the event, it is NOT the event)
2. (milestone 2) Conduct 'event X' (this is the event on the calendar)

In this case you are linking two separate milestones. Site Surveys and Inspections are typical examples of using this approach. Here is an example of what the end-user sees in the case of a Site Survey:

 

 

The user is prompted to schedule a time for the future "Conduct Site Survey" milestone. The user can click the Scheduler icon to see side by side availability of multiple people, and allows them to put the event in a desired timeslot:

 

 

On completion of the "Schedule Site Survey" milestone, the new "Conduct Site Survey" milestone is populated with the date-time that user defined while completing the "Schedule Site Survey" milestone:

 

To configure the milestones this way, the administrator uses the Scheduling Options tab to define the scheduled event, and for this event to be scheduled by a user who is completing a preceding milestone. See the Scheduling Options screenshot below, where the "Use Preceding Milestone(s) to Schedule this Event" checkbox is checked.

 

Also note that when using a preceding milestone to schedule this event, the admin can define whether the user MUST enter a scheduled time when completing the predecessor, or will be allowed to complete the predecessor without actually inputting a date-time on the calendar.