It’s often funny how small things can make a big difference, and how easy it is to get used to something just being the way it is. The “issue job” screen has been a core feature of MARKUS since around 2009, and is designed to support and guide you through the engineer booking process. We are constantly making changes to the screen and related processes to improve it, since the start of 2023 there have been 27 changes to it – but throughout the years the styling has remained fairly constant. At a review meeting last year we were surprised by a passing comment from one user – they complained that sometimes on their super-wide screen monitor it wasn’t obvious where the horizontal lines were between the people, and so they regularly clicked on the wrong person. This feedback was passed on to the dev team, and after taking a fresh look at the screen they agreed with the user. A very minor visual tweak later, and we’ve enabled the same banding style as elsewhere in MARKUS to easily keep your place in a report when scrolling left/right.
On the same theme, we had a user who was tasked with regularly extracting purchasing information relating to a range of jobs, and they had ended up with a process that walked through all the jobs on a contract to build up a list of purchase orders relating to the jobs. They had already identified that the “Find PO” report *almost* gave them what they wanted, but the Job filter limited them to a single job. After a quick call we changed the PO report to accept a “Job Number Containing” filter, and turned what had been a long and boring task into a single XLS export.
Neither of these changes seem revolutionary, but for the users affected it has dramatically improved their day to day use of MARKUS.
New Features
- Added support for visual report banding to the issue job screen
- New job number containing filtered added to the Find Purchase Order report
- Added site UPRN (asset alpha) to the survey answers report
- Created a PPM task report for HVAC/RACSAMS mobile contractors
- Added a new region filter and matching field on the RACSAMS places to go summary report
- Added a restriction to reversing invoices, to only those with the permission to create invoices
- Updated the invoice entry screen to use the job ticket instead of the job number
- Added job status field to the purchase invoice detail report
- Changes to the supplier purchase invoice API to allow PDF invoices to be posted directly against jobs (and purchase orders)
Changes For a Single Contractor
Timesheet changes for bank holidays
Fixed timesheet time format HH:HH captioning for overtime periods
- New timesheet layout with work on PPM tasks split by contract
- Limited the UWE / Archibus notes export process to 2000 characters
- Changed to UWE / Archibus PPM task importer to prevent empty addresses from being created
- Added some extra fields to the eque2 exporter, so save people having to manually add them
- Changed Barrow CC / CX interface to use additional XML fields for site contact details, if present
- New compact invoice layout that suppresses sales lines to give a choice between full invoices or summary invoices with just a job description
- New customer mobile app build
Platform Improvements
- 33% finished PHP8 upgrade for contractors with interfaces
- 100% finished PHP8 upgrade for non-interfaced contractors
- Cleansed old mobile app build configs from the testing and staging servers
- Extra logging added to the pre-visit RAMs screen to capture information relating to empty surveys
- Early access: new Jira API integration to Epix’s internal issue tracker to expose limited support issue information directly to users – aka Epix Support Portal
Bug Fixes
- Fixed where Epix staff sending login email links would clear a user’s permissions
- Fixed a bug with new categories not saving
- Fixed a bug that prevented new lines from being retrospectively added to purchase invoices if the screen was changed to display ticket number instead of job number
- Fixed a bug stopping bulk communications from being generated where a non-operative letter option was selected alongside filtering for a single operative
- Translated the title of the Unpassed Invoices report from Parseltongue to English
- Fixed a bug with the “Average Sales” calculation on the client summary contract report
