We had a lovely trip up to Scotland in February to catch up with two new contractors from last year, pop in for a coffee with a very old customer, and welcome a new contractor to the family. Whilst we were there, Chris and Jess were busy training users and getting feedback, and tweaking the systems to help them get the most from MARKUS. Coming straight out of these sessions we’ve now added a new dashboard widget for jobs broken down by priority. This works in a similar way to the items requiring action widget, and supports the “Monitored Clients” concept. The new widget groups priorities by duration to make it easier to manage overlapping target dates between clients using differently worded SLAs.
We are always adding new reports and dashboard widgets – but often it’s hard to explain in a single line what a report does. We wrote a report for a contractor in December, so it is definitely live in all systems, called “Comparison of ETTC to actual time spent on jobs”. This slipped quietly under the radar, but is an excellent report to show jobs that are taking longer (or quicker!) than expected. This strikes to the core of what MARKUS can do if properly configured and used – if you’ve setup realistic estimated durations for SOR (sales) codes, and the engineers are recording the visits in real time, then we can highlight the jobs that took an unexpected amount of on-site time to complete.
The screenshot is based on my demo data, so it’s not that surprising that I’ve been finishing work more quickly than the SORs suggest. This is a great report for monitoring the performance of your contracts to make sure they are matching the parameters that you priced the work on. It relies on the SOR “ETTC” being set correctly, but that’s just a setup question – and once it is, you can quickly be monitoring the types of work that are taking longer than you quoted for, or the engineers that are spending more time on the same tasks. Just search for “actual time” – and if you can’t find the report then give us a call!
New Features
- New dashboard widget to show Jobs ordered by Priority
- Added hover row highlighting on every report
- Added additional logging for MARKUS Mobile dial errors to help report on causes of failed dials
- Added cost code to the jobs attend by report
- New importer to import purchase order confirmations from Travis Perkins
- Added the ability to email out specific reports to specific users each night
- Added related costcodes to the System Users report
- Improved the PDF import queue report to show more information about failed uploads
- Added generation of thumbnails for uploaded PDFs
- Added a way for engineers to record mileage corrections on MARKUS Mobile
- Added the ability to record a car registration number at clock on / off to MARKUS Mobile
- Added multiple features to the operative mileage report to highlight unexpected distances and to reflect new data from the mobile app
- Changed a communication substitution to show the alternative values for quoted lines
- Swapped around status change reason options so they are now against the status the user is changing the job to
- Added a contract type filter on the First Visit Fix report
- Updated the “Completed Service Jobs” report to support different contract types
- Added support for pick-list additional job details when adding details from the jobsheet
- Introduced the ability to identify mileage which exceeds a system-set limit in the daily mileage report
- Added Client Telephone & Email on the Client summary report
- Added Address and Postcode fields to the job list report
- Added a way to exclude attachments on the health and safety screen on MARKUS Mobile
- Improved the display of jobs that span multiple days in the operative diary
- Hid inactive clients from the list on the cost code setup screen
- Hid contracts with archived clients on the cost code set-up screen
- Added Postcode field and filter on the PO Lines report
- New user permission to replace the system option allowing the ability to delete photos, surveys and notes recorded against a job
Changes For a Single Contractor
- Stopped print/share button showing on orders at drafted
- Fixed refetching Archibus/UWE individual job with an empty guid; improved how we handle archived interface files for UWE documents to make them easier to find and take up less space; improvements to the equipment API including removal of parent sites from “rooms” and “floors”
- Added new Verisae/Coop problem types and log in history when problem types aren’t matched
- New customer mobile app builds
- Tweaked the visit print to show refrigerant weight next to refrigerant type
- Created a new job importer API for ichoosr
- Created a new job importer API for Easy-PV/Solar-PV
- Changing the Xero Purchase Invoice Export to use the nominal code for the lines
- New Sor Importer for SFG20 APIs
Platform Improvements
- Continued work on next-gen dashboard
- Continued migration to PDO
- Continued work on automated billing platform
- Continued work on internal orchestration control
- Added automated testing for installation of new builds to devices
- Updates to internal tools for logging app crashes
Bug Fixes
- Changed how we handle empty responses to GPS requests whilst on site
- Fixed a timesheet bug that stopped holidays from showing properly
- Fixed which status the parent jobs go to when the status of the child jobs are changed via cancelling an issued child job
- Fixed a bug in the project job importer which prevented debugging output
- Fixed MARKUS AI Agent for Supplier Invoices not handling multiple pages
- Improved handling for unexpected states in MARKUS AI Agent for Supplier Invoices such as the invoice already existing
- Stopped the email field from autopopulating when emailing an invoice except from our internal billing system
- Fixed the timesheet printout if the visit spans multiple days
- Improvements to the issue job screen to make the legend display correctly and make the issue popup span the whole screen
- Fixed KPI Status Date calculation when working and not working weekends
- Fixed a bug that stopped users from being able to link parts to SORs
- Stopped the allocation suggestor from offering days after the required date
- Fixed a bug where a filter was not passed through to a breakdown first time fix report
- Fixed the caption for category when bulk changing jobs
