Many field service companies, particularly in industries like Utilities, Oil & Gas, and Telco, deal with the challenge of managing dynamic crews. This often involves a daily process of assigning technicians to work orders, a task known as the "Morning Shuffle." This traditional method is slow and inefficient, because you have to manually copy and paste tasks and make constant changes to schedules.
Crew shells are a solution designed to simplify this process. Think of a crew shell as an empty container or a template for a team that allows you to assign work to the team structure itself before you assign specific technicians. This gives you the flexibility to manage tasks and crew members separately, making the Morning Shuffle more efficient.
Using Crew Shells to Simplify Crew Management
Crew shells streamline how you manage your field teams:
-
Schedule to Empty Crews: Assign jobs to a crew shell even if it doesn't have any technicians assigned to it. This allows planners to set up the day's work in advance and add technicians later.
-
Automated Work Assignment: When you add technicians to a crew shell, they automatically inherit all the work orders (WOs) assigned to that shell. This eliminates the need for manual copy-pasting of tasks.
-
Retain Work Orders: If you remove technicians from a crew shell, the system removes assigned WOs from their individual schedules. The WOs, however, remain with the crew shell, ready for the next assigned technicians.
-
Integration with Other Systems: Use dedicated REST APIs to programmatically add or remove technicians from a crew shell. This helps you integrate the process with other automated systems.
Understand Current Scope and Limitations
While crew shells offer a powerful solution for dynamic crew management, it's important to understand their current capabilities and limitations.
Supported Features
The Crew Shell module supports the features explicitly mentioned in its documentation, focusing on flexible crew composition.
Currently Unsupported Areas
-
The Capacity and Forecast module.
-
The Scheduling & Dispatching Mobile App
-
Technicians can manage their tasks on the app after they're assigned to a crew shell.
-
-
The Bundler module.
-
The Multistage module.
-
The "Weekly plan" view
-
Only the Daily Plan and Multi-day Plan views are supported.
-
Functional Limitations
-
Multi-day Activities: The current version doesn’t support multi-day activities or multi-stage tasks for crew shells.
-
Skill Management: The current skill management doesn't support time-based skills with expiration dates, different skill levels such as beginner and expert, or splitting a single skill across multiple team members.
-
Real-time Scheduling: The system doesn't consider crew shells in its real-time scheduling processes.
Getting Started with Crew Shells
By using crew shells, you can improve how you manage your field service operations. To begin, explore the following documentation:
-
Activate and Enable the Crew Shell Module: Learn the first steps to make this functionality available.
-
Configure Crew Shells: Understand how to set up the foundational parameters for Crew Shells.
-
View and Manage Crew Shells in the Daily Plan: See how Crew Shells are utilized in the daily scheduling context.
-
Manage Crew Shell Calendar: Understand and manage the work schedules for your Crew Shells.
-
Manage Crew Shell Members: Learn how to assign and manage individual technicians within a Crew Shell.
-
Manage Crew Shell Addresses: Understand how to define geographical departure and arrival points.
-
Associate a skill with a Crew Shell: Learn how to assign competencies to your Crew Shells.